Prof. Hérica Valladares

Hérica Valladares is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses primarily on the interaction of visual and literary culture in the late Roman republic and early empire. Prof. Valladares has published various articles on Roman wall painting, Latin love elegy, the Renaissance reception of Ovid, and eighteenth-century antiquarian practices. Her book, Painting, Poetry, and the Invention of Tenderness in the Early Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2021) analyzes amatory representations in Roman wall painting and Latin poetry between the late first century B.C.E. and the late first century C.E. She is currently working on two book-length projects. One focuses on objects made exclusively for women during the Roman imperial period (Fashioning Empire: Roman Women and Their Objects), and the other investigates the representation of epistolary exchanges in Roman wall painting (Love Letters from Pompeii: Material and Epistolary Fictions in Roman Wall Painting).

At UNC, Professor Valladares regularly teaches courses on Roman art and archaeology (CLAR/ARTH 247), life in ancient Pompeii (CLAR 380), Roman architecture (CLAR/ARTH 465), and Roman painting (CLAR/ARTH 476). She also offers graduate seminars on topics such as the Roman house, image and text from antiquity to the Renaissance, and methods in Classical art history. She is a member of UNC’s Curriculum in Archaeology and adjunct faculty in the Department of Art and Art History. Since 2020, Professor Valladares has served as Chair of the Academic Advisory Committee of the Ackland Art Museum.