JCB Reads: Erika Valdivieso, author of Empire’s Companion Virgilian Epics from Colonial Iberoamerica

Launched during the 2024-5 academic year, JCB Reads offers former JCB fellows the opportunity to share their recent book publications. These online events are open to anyone who is interested. The link to the Zoom meeting will be published a few days before the event takes place on the individual event page.

Join us on Monday, October 26, 2026 at 12 p.m. EDT for a discussion of Erika Valdivieso's new book Empire’s Companion: Virgilian Epics from Colonial Iberoamerica.

About the book

A study of how Latin poetry shaped colonial aspirations in sixteenth- to eighteenth-century South and Central America.

Accompanying Iberian colonizers to the Americas, Virgil’s Aeneid inspired generations of colonial elites to write their own epic poems in Latin—priming imaginations for Spanish and Portuguese rule in the Americas. In Empire’s Companion, Erika Valdivieso recovers this lost strain of poetry for classicists and early Americanists alike. Each chapter introduces readers to a new poem that adapts Virgil for a different geographic context. These epics, Valdivieso argues, show elites working to reshape the New World in their own image, drawing on Virgil to think about the conquest of Indigenous peoples, to form new ideas about the globe, and to consider the shifting power dynamics between America and Europe. A powerful corrective to prevailing ideas about the reception of Virgil in the Americas, Empire’s Companion reveals the imperial potential of the Aeneid in the hands of governing elites.

For more information about this title, visit https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/E/bo267698530.html.