Research
As a researcher, I study how and why antiquity matters in the present. Drawing on reception studies, cultural history, and media studies, I explore how stories, ideas, and artistic forms travel from antiquity to today, and how antiquity is reimagined in return.
My work includes studies on the parallels between modern antiheroes in television and Greek tragedy, the myth of Narcissus and its relevance to digital communication, and the long afterlife of the idea of a “Golden Age” from Virgil to Tolkien. In my forthcoming monograph, The Epic Strikes Back: How Transmedia Fantasy Franchises Reshape the Epic Tradition, I examine the connections between ancient epic and contemporary fantasy franchises such as Star Wars.
My upcoming monograph explores how modern fantasy franchises like Star Wars continue the tradition of ancient epic storytelling. It looks at how we often think about epics today—not just as old poems, but as large, interconnected story worlds with heroes, worlds, and recurring myths.
The book shows three key ideas. First, modern fantasy stories don’t just borrow from ancient epics – they also help shape how we understand what “epic” even means today. Second, many popular storytelling ideas, like the “hero’s journey” and a screenplay in “three acts“, come from selective readings of ancient texts that leave out much of their complexity. Third, the structure of modern transmedia franchises – with shared universe, serial storytelling, and narrative expansion across films, series, books, and games – presents a surprisingly good perspective for understanding ancient mythology, revealing it as far more interconnected and world-driven than is often assumed.
By looking at these connections, the book not only shows how ancient epic survives in modern culture, but also how some of today’s most familiar storytelling techniques already existed (often in surprising way) in antiquity.
Publications
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This article compares Euripides’ Medea and Breaking Bad to explore how ancient tragedy still shapes modern antihero stories. By examining the characters of Medea and Walter White, it looks at why audiences remain fascinated by morally troubling protagonists and how modern antiheros can help us understand the workings of ancient tragedy. Read here.
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This article explores how “Golden Age” ideas still shape modern pop culture through fantasy franchises like Star Wars. It shows how the story combines older traditions of idealised pasts and technological anxiety, creating a vision of rise, fall, and renewal. By tracing influences from ancient mythology to modern science fiction, the article argues that Golden Age narratives remain a powerful way of thinking about progress, politics, and technology in both past and future societies. Read here.
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This article argues that Reception Studies can help justify and strengthen the place of Latin and Ancient Greek in modern education. By showing how Greco-Roman antiquity continues to shape Western culture, it makes the case for using modern cultural references in the classroom. Contemporary receptions, in particular, help students reflect on the relationship between their own culture and the ancient “other,” and can be directly integrated into teaching through texts, exercises, and classroom materials. Download here.
Current projects
Public edition of The Epic Strikes Back
Together with literary agent Marianne Schönberg, I am preparing a public edition of my monograph on the epic tradition in modern fantasy franchises. The book translates my research on classical epic and its reception in contemporary popular culture into a more accessible format, aimed at a broader audience beyond academia.
Writing will begin in the summer, with submission to a publisher planned for the end of 2027.
Constructing Fantastical Worlds from Antiquity to the Present
This edited volume, which I co-edit with Merlijn Breunesse and Caterina Fossi, explores how fantastical worlds are built from antiquity to the present. Bringing together media studies, narratology, and classical reception, it questions the idea that fantastical worldbuilding is a purely modern phenomenon. Instead, it highlights how ancient and modern storytelling share strikingly similar techniques for creating immersive, expansive narrative worlds that shape the cultural imagination.
The volume is currently under review at Brill.
Tech-bro Prometheus: Mythology in the Age of AI
This Veni-proposal I’m currently working on explores how contemporary tech entrepreneurs and companies, including figures such as Elon Musk, mobilise the myth of Prometheus to frame narratives of technological innovation and AI. It analyses a range of digital and corporate sources to explore how this myth is reworked in line with present-day technological and ideological agendas.
The proposal will be submitted for the 2027 NWO Veni-call.
Decolonizing the Roman Villa
This article which I am working on with Gertjan Plets examines how Roman villa heritage sites in the northern Limes regions construct narratives of the Roman past. It analyses how heritage representations engage with, or silence, issues such as slavery, extraction, and imperial power. Drawing on critical ancient world studies and postcolonial theory, the project explores how contemporary heritage practices shape and sometimes reproduce idealised visions of Roman civilisation in relation to present-day debates on colonialism and environmental change.
We plan to submit the article in the fall of 2026.
Available for talks, interviews, and collaborations.
Contact
Location
Utrecht
k.vacano@uu.nl