Kristi A. Eastin was born in Billings, Montana and grew up in the heart of the central
San Joaquin Valley of California in the small farming town of Reedley. She graduated
from Reedley High School, worked herself through college for a time, and found herself
employed as a professional cyclist until 1999. In 2000 she entered college in earnest
at California State University, Fresno, where she earned a B.A. in English Literature
with a Minor in Latin. During her time at Fresno State she was the recipient of Sally
Casanova Pre-Doctoral Fellow, 2001-2002, the Tokalon Memorial Award for Women, 2001-2002,
and was the Honorable Mention for CSU, William Randolph Hearst—CSU Trustee’s Award
in 2001.
In 2002, she entered the graduate program in Comparative Literature at Brown University
and received her Ph.D. in 2009. Her dissertation, Virgil and the Visual Imagination: Illustrative Programs from Antiquity to John Ogilby
(1654), examines the Virgilian illustrative tradition with emphasis on the Georgics. Ms. Eastin’s work on illustrated editions of Virgil won her a Research Grant from
the Friends of the Princeton University Library (2006-2007) to work in the exceptional
Junius S. Morgan Virgil collection at Princeton. She has recently written an essay
on seventeenth-century illustrations of Virgil’s Aeneid entitled, “The Aeneas of Virgil: A Dramatic Performance Presented in the Original Latin by John Ogilby”,
to be published in the forthcoming Companion to Virgil, eds. Joseph Farrell and Michael J. Putnam (Blackwell 2009).
Awards, Honors and Affiliations
- Graduate School Dissertation Fellowship, Brown University, 2006-2007
- Research Grant, Princeton University Library, 2006-2007
- University Fellowship, Brown University, 2002-2004
- Summer Fellowship, Brown University, 2002-2003
- Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Fellow, 2001-2002
- Tokalon Memorial Award for Women, 2001-2002
- CSU, William Randolph Hearst—CSU Trustee’s Award, Honorable Mention, 2001
- McClatchy Scholarship, in the area of Classical Studies, 2000-2001
