A new book from Boston College graduate Tedd Wimperis presents a fresh take on the Aeneid, the ancient Roman epic poem written by Vergil that tells the mythical story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero who leads a community of refugees to a new home in Italy. Constructing Communities in Vergil’s Aeneid: Cultural Memory, Identity, and Ideology (University of Michigan Press, 2024) focuses on how cultural identities are formed, expressed, and used in politics, inside the fictionalized world of the Aeneid and in the real-world Roman Empire. From the publisher: “This book investigates how the Aeneid’s fictive ethnic communities—the Trojans, Carthaginians, Latins, and Arcadians who populate its poetic world—are shown to have identities, myths, and cultural memories of their own. And much like their real-life Roman counterparts, they engage in the politics of the past in such contexts as royal iconography, diplomacy, public displays, and incitements to war. Where previous studies of identity and memory in the Aeneid have focused on the poem’s constructions of Roman identity, Constructing Communities turns the spotlight onto the characters themselves to show how the world inside the poem is replicating, as if in miniature, real forms of contemporary political and cultural discourse, reflecting an historical milieu where appeals to Roman identity were vigorously asserted in political rhetoric.” Wimperis, who earned a bachelor’s degree from BC in 2011, is an assistant professor of classical languages at Elon University.