Valentina Barrile studied Classics at the University of Messina, where she obtained a bachelor's degree (2014) and a master's degree, both with theses on Greek literature. She was then awarded a London Arts and Humanities Partnership scholarship and moved to the UK to pursue her doctoral studies at King's College London under the supervision of Professor Michael B. Trapp. She obtained her PhD in Classics in 2023 with a thesis on Late Antique Greek litterature (Poesie in scheinbarer Prosa: angles of inspection on Himerius' prose), which explored the reworking of earlier poetic material into epideictic speeches. Since June 2023, she has been working as a postdoctoral researcher for the ERC project MeLa, where she was tasked with translating and analyzing the letters of the Byzantine monk Maximos Planoudes.
Valentina's research interests include rhetorical self-fashioning, identity formation, the interplay between tradition and innovation, and the repurposing of education in times of transition.