Participant Bios

MARIOS ANASTASIADIS is AG Leventis Scholar and PhD Candidate in Greek History at the University of Edinburgh, UK. An affiliate researcher of Edinburgh’s Centre for Global History, his research explores the link between slavery and the economy of the Ancient Greek world, with an emphasis on factors such as slave agency, instrumental rationality, advantage maximization, and recognition of competency. Email: s2060694@ed.ac.uk

LILY BICKERS is a Masters student in Classics and Ancient Civilizations at Leiden University, and graduated from Cambridge University’s Classical Tripos in 2020. She has a variety of academic interests, including time and narrative in epic poetry, classical reception in digital media, and gorgons in archaic Greek art. She also enjoys making digital art, translating ancient poetry, and thinking constantly about 90s anime. Lily can be found on twitter @gorgonmaenad. . Email: lily.bickers@googlemail.com

LEAH F. BORQUEZ is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of California Berkeley. Her primary area of interest is Roman colonization of the Iberian Peninsula, specifically the intersection of native Iberian, Phoenician, and Roman identities and cultures aiming for a more localized version of colonial history. She also does work in receptions of Roman history as well as the history of medicine and mental health in the Early Roman Empire. You can find her on twitter @lapislazuleah. Email: lborquez@berkeley.edu

ABIGAIL BREUKER is a PhD student in the Classical Studies Program at Columbia University. Her primary interests lie in the field of Ancient Philosophy, namely in ancient epistemology and ethics. Abigail mainly works on Plato, though she is also interested in the application of ancient philosophy to the modern world. Email: arb2287@columbia.edu

MALINA BUTUROVIC is a PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and the Program for the Interdisciplinary Humanities at Princeton University. Her work explores the intellectual history of family, reproduction, and heredity, with particular attention to the links between 5th-4th century BCE (‘classical’) and 1st-2nd century CE (‘imperial’) Greek traditions of medical, natural historical, and philosophical investigation. Email: malinab@princeton.edu

THEODORE (TEDDY) R. DELWICHE is a PhD student at Yale University. His research interests lie at the intersection of early modern European intellectual history, colonial America, and classical reception studies. He is particularly interested in the historical practices and purposes of classical education. Published work of his has appeared in The Classical Outlook, The New England QuarterlyHistory of Universities, Lias: The Journal of Early Modern Intellectual Culture, and Ambix: The Journal for the Society of the History of Alchemy and Science. Forthcoming (accepted) work will soon appear in Modern Intellectual HistoryManuscript Studies: A Journal of the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, and The Huntington Library Quarterly.  Email: teddy.delwiche@yale.edu

ROBIN DIVER completed a PhD at University of Birmingham, UK, funded through the AHRC Midlands3Cities cohort. Her research focuses on the adaptation of sexual violence in British and North American children’s books of Greek myth from 1850 to the modern day. She is a regular participant in the Our Mythical Childhood network dealing with reception in children’s media, and has been general editor of the academic Rosetta Journal. She is also a winner of a social enterprise competition to pitch business solutions to address social problems, with her fintech app to help victims of financial abuse by romantic partners. Email: robin.diver@hotmail.com

SOPHIA ELZIE (she/her) completed her Master of Studies in Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford in June 2021 under the supervision of Dr. Constanze Guthenke, with a dissertation entitled 'Mothers, Children, and Tragic Overliving: Reading Euripides’ Medea and Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…'. Her research interests are in the reception of ancient literature in works by or about marginalized groups, read through postcolonial and feminist lenses. She received her BA in Classical Languages and Literature in 2020 from Agnes Scott College. She has also worked with the Center for Hellenic Studies as a Digital Humanities intern and as a trainer for the Open Greek and Latin Project (@OGLP_Volunteers), working to make the first 1,000 years of Greek available online through Perseus' Scaife viewer. Sophia is on twitter @s.r.elzie. In her free time, she posts on her blog 'Sumus' providing resources for students and promoting diverse narratives in Classics (sumusweare.wordpress.com). Email: robbinselzie@gmail.com

STEPHEN FODROCZI is a second-year PhD student of Classical Literature and Philology at Cornell University from Atlanta, Georgia. Stephen graduated magna cum laude from Florida State University in Spring 2020, receiving three B.A. degrees in Classics, Music, and English Literature. He joined the Cornell Classics department track in the fall of the same year. His honor’s thesis, “Homeric Songs: Oral Poetic Recitations and Musical Performances”, explored the musical aspects and oral nature of the Homeric epics with regards to similar musical and oral poetic traditions. He is interested in the orality-literary framework, epic (especially Homer), ancient music and performance, and Greek epigram. Other interests include Roman satire, katabasis, Sappho, film studies, and the issue of genre in ancient literature. Email: sdf75@cornell.edu

ALWIN FRANKE is Visiting Assistant Professor of German at Reed College. He specializes in German literature and critical thought with particular focus on their epistemological contexts in the sciences, media, and the social. He has written about the interplay between literary modernism and mathematical modernity and is currently working on a literary archeology of the conceptual triad milieu-environment-Umwelt. Additionally, Alwin is interested in the entanglement of German philosophy and literature with racialized imaginaries from the 18th to the 21st century. He is currently editing an English-language reader that revisits key texts from the German intellectual tradition through the lens of postcolonial and critical race theory. Email: ajf2193@columbia.edu

PAULA GAITHER is currently a PhD student at Stanford University in the Classics department. She attended Columbia University for her BA in Classics and received a Kellett Fellowship to fund a MPhil at Oxford University. Her research focuses on systems of racialization in the ancient world and the reception and construction of the classical world in the post-antique. Email: pgaither@stanford.edu

PATRICIA EUNJI KIM (she/her) is an art historian, curator, and educator based in New York City. She is Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow at New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and Associate Director of Public Engagement and Editor at Monument Lab. Dr. Kim’s research and teaching use methods from the arts and humanities to explore questions of gender, race, power, and memory from antiquity to the present. She is currently writing the first book-length study on the visual and material culture of Hellenistic queenship from western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean. Dr. Kim is co-editor of Timescales: Thinking Across Ecological Temporalities (University of Minnesota Press, 2020), a book that features artists, humanists, and scientists to model new modes of interdisciplinary collaboration in the environmental humanities. At present, she is co-editing Shaping the Past: Transnational Memory at Work (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, under contract), which features artists, curators, and activists who reimagine monuments across the globe. Committed to publicly-engaged scholarship, Kim's curatorial experience includes researching artifacts from encyclopedic museums to co-creating community-driven digital archives. Learn more about Dr. Kim's work at www.patriciaekim.com.

AMANDA KUBIC (she/her) is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Amanda obtained her MA in Greek from the University of Michigan in 2021, her MA in Classics from Washington University in St. Louis in 2018, and her BA in Comparative Literature and Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016. Amanda’s doctoral research focuses on the reception of ancient Greco- Roman material by 20th and 21st century American, British, and Greek women poets and performance artists. She is particularly interested in questions related to gender and sexuality, disability, embodiment, and poetics. Email: akubic@umich.edu

XAVIER LAFONTAINE (he/him), is finishing a joint-PhD in Religious Studies (Strabourg, France) and Greek Philology (Rome La Sapienza, Italy) about Biblical retellings in the Jewish and Christian Sibylline Oracles and currently teaches French and Latin in a small secondary school near Troyes, France. He graduated with a Master of Arts in Classics from the University of Paris IV Sorbonne in 2014, a degree from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris in 2016 and a degree from the French École Biblique in Jerusalem in 2020. Email: xavier.lafontaine@etu.unistra.fr

CAT LAMBERT is a PhD candidate in Classics at Columbia, where she researches book culture and the social history of reading in the early Roman imperial period. Her dissertation, Bad Readers in Ancient Rome, engages book history with feminist and queer studies to trace how the cultural and literary phenomenon of the "bad" reader negotiates dynamics of gender, sexuality, class, and cultural identity across a series of imperial Greek and Latin texts. At Columbia, she has taught Latin and Greek language, classical mythology, and a new course for the department on queerness in antiquity. She is a regular participant in the Columbia & Barnard Ancient Drama Group and is the co-founder of Teaching Citational Practice: Critical Feminist Approaches. Email: cl3509@columbia.edu

JESSICA LAWRENCE has just begun her second year of her PhD at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Classics. Her research interests are rooted in Classical Reception with a focus on contemporary, female-authored literature and the preoccupations these works share. After Jessica’s undergraduate degree she worked in Publishing and literary event management, she still maintains links to these industries as the experiences and skills she gained there have direct, positive impacts on her research. When not in the library, Jessica can be found teaching literary yoga and has been known to subject a yoga class to a discussion on Antigone. Email: jl841@cam.ac.uk.

GIULIO LEGHISSA is a 5th-year PhD student at University of Toronto (Department of Classics). He graduated with a BA from University of Bologna (Italy) and later he from University of Oxford (UK) with an MPhil in Greek and Latin Language and Literature. The studies he pursues are various and reflect the different, multicultural nature of his learning. After a beginning as Latin philologist and textual critic (BA dissertation: a commentary on a section of Plautus’ Aulularia), he developed further interests in Greek literature and papyrology (MPhil dissertation: a commentary of the fragments of Tyrtaeus’ Eunomia). Now, he finds himself working on a topic related to ancient history, in particular on connectivity and mobility between North Africa and Egypt in a longue-durée perspective that encompasses Hellenistic and Roman periods. The aim of his current work is twofold. Firstly, he intends to unpack the colonial underpinnings of Western scholarly discourse on ‘connectivity’ and North Africa’s environmental marginality in the Mediterranean basin. Secondly, he means to show that connectivity along the southern Mediterranean coastline did exist and was not hindered by so-called environmental constraints, as it has generally been assumed; this will be possible by casting light on different instances of mobility, both on sea and in land, between North Africa (from Morocco to Cyrenaica, also called Maghrib) and Egypt. Besides, Giulio is interested in the application of indigenous methodologies to Classics and in the uncovering of ‘indigenous voices’ in classical texts. He believes that Greco-Latin texts do not necessarily endorse, or inform, Western colonialist practices necessarily; instead, they convey different points of views and establish a dialogue moment between Greco-Roman and foreign systems of knowledge. Email: giulio.leghissa@mail.utoronto.ca

GIACOMO LOI obtained his BA (2015) and MA (2017) in Classics at the University of the Sacred Heart, Milan, and has furthered his studies at the Danish Academy in Rome, at the National Hellenic Research Institute, Athens, and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is a PhD candidate in Classics at Johns Hopkins University, where he also collaborates with the Stulman Program in Jewish Studies. His interests lie at the intersection of different cultures with the Graeco-Roman world, and particularly in Italian culture and in the reception of classical literature into Modern Hebrew culture and in World Jewish literature. Currently, he is a 2021/22 doctoral fellow at the Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Shoah, Paris, and chercheur affilié at Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, where he works on his project “’There is no analogy within History’. The use of Classical Myth in Hebrew Holocaust Literature”. Email: giacomo.loi@jhu.edu

GIOVANNI LOVISETTO is a third year PhD student currently enrolled in the Classical Studies program at Columbia University in the City of New York. His research focuses on Greek archaeology and art history, dealing with cults and sanctuaries, architectural sculpture, as well as classical iconographies and their reception in modern and contemporary art and literature. Email: gl2623@columbia.edu

JUAN CARLOS GARZON MANTILLA is an Ecuadorian Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. This academic year, he is doing archival and archaeological research with the support of the Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies at Freie Universitat Berlin and the Social Sciences Research Council. His doctoral dissertation is an Intellectual History of Spanish American antiquarian and cosmographical practices that explores how was the vast ancient world seen from the sixteenth century Andes. Email: jg3898@columbia.edu

ALICIA MATZ began her PhD career at Boston University in the fall of 2017. She earned her B.A. in Classics in 2015 from the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA, and her M.A. in Classics from Rutgers University in 2017. Her research interests include Augustan literature, politics, and material culture, and reception, especially in science fiction and fantasy literature. She is currently working on a dissertation titled “Diana in Augustan Poetry and Culture.” In her free time she runs the @LOTRinLatin twitter, where she is translating Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (slowly) into Latin, as well as @IodulaDicit where she tweets as Baby Yoda in Latin. She also helps admin @CripAntiquity. Her main twitter is @duxfeminafacti9.Email: amatz@bu.edu

GIORGIO MOTISI is a PhD candidate in Art History at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa, Italy). His doctoral research focuses on the Italian Ultimo Naturalismo (“Last Naturalism”) during the 1950s. His main area of interest is Italian 20th century painting and sculpture, with an emphasis on their connection to the sociocultural context, the reception of ancient and Renaissance art, and the critical dialogue with the international avant-gard.  On these subjects he has contributed book chapters, published articles in academic journals, and attended international conferences. Giorgio is a contributor to Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Enciclopedia  Treccani) with entries on several Italian painters. In January 2022 he will start a fellowship at CIMA (Center for Italian Modern Art) in New York, where he will collaborate on the exhibition Staging Injustice. Italian Art  1880-1917. Email: giorgio.motisi@sns.it

FRANCES MYATT is a first-year PhD student in Classics at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where she is researching pregnancy and childbirth in the works of Ovid under the supervision of Professor Philip Hardie, funded by a Vice-Chancellor’s Award and Jebb Studentship. After her BA in Classics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, she was awarded a Herchel Smith scholarship to spend a year at Harvard, followed by a Leverhulme Study Abroad Studentship to study for a Masters in AVL (Comparative Literature) at LMU, Munich. Frances’ research interests include Augustan poetry, classical reception, and the relationship between bodies and literature. She previously blogged on classical reception at www.contactingtheclassics.wordpress.com. Email: frym2@cantab.ac.uk

LEIRE OLABARRIA holds a DPhil in Egyptology from the University of Oxford (UK) and is currently Lecturer in Egyptology at the University of Birmingham (UK), where she teaches modules on the history, language, and archaeology of Egypt. Her primary research focus is on kinship and group formation in the Middle Kingdom, which she studies from an anthropological perspective. She is the author of a monograph entitled Kinship and Family in Ancient Egypt: Archaeology and Anthropology in Dialogue, published by Cambridge University Press in 2020. Other topics she works on include gender, the social construction of monumental spaces, the impact of ethnography on the creation of Egyptology, and the reception of ancient Egypt in heavy metal and in science fiction. She is also a field archaeologist and has been working at the site of Dayr el-Barsha in Middle Egypt since 2012. Email: L.Olabarria@bham.ac.uk

ARON OUWERKERK (BA) is a research master’s (MPhil) student in early modern history at Utrecht University (The Netherlands) where he specializes in Neo-Latin literature from the Low Countries. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Classics at the University of Amsterdam in 2020. In his research and teaching, he aims to incorporate original, never before published Latin texts from early modern women. Email: aron.ouwerkerk@gmail.com

CHARLES PLETCHER is a PhD candidate in Classics at Columbia University, where he is also pursuing a certificate in Comparative Literature. His research interests center on drama, with focal points in fifth-century Athens, medieval Iberia, and 20th-century Latin America. His dissertation looks at key props in four of Sophocles’ plays, showing how characters associate social and epistemological value with the props as they exchange them on stage. Outside of these literary pursuits, Charles has worked as a software engineer for projects like the Open Commentary Platform. Avocationally, Charles enjoys performing music, and he is slowly learning to play the aulos. Email: charles.pletcher@columbia.edu

ANA SANTORY RODRÍGUEZ began her undergraduate journey at the University of  Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, around the time President Barack Obama signed  the Puerto Rico Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Act (PROMESA) into  law. At the UPR, Santory Rodríguez majored in Modern Languages, Art History, and Comparative Literature but transferred to Wesleyan University in the aftermath of Hurricane María, graduating from Classical Studies with honors in 2020. She is now looking forward to the next step: an MA in Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. Email: asantory@umich.edu

EMMANUELA SCHOINOPLOKAKI is a PhD student in the Classics Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her current research focuses on Greek tragedy and issues of displacement and sense of belonging of collective and individual tragic heroes. In addition to Greek drama, she is keenly interested in the ancient novel, and in classical reception studies. Outside of her research, Emmanuela enthusiastically teaches modern Greek at UCSB. She also enjoys writing and translating works which show how concepts of the ancient past shape the modern world. Finally, she loves collaborating on public humanities’ projects. Email: schoinoplokaki@ucsb.edu.

RAFFAELLA SERO holds a BA in Classics from the University of Oxford. In 2020 she gained her MPhil from the University of Cambridge, with a dissertation titled "But what about Suetonius? Succession and the Lives of the Caesars in Shakespeare’s Wars of the Roses”, written under the supervision of Professor Mary Beard. She is currently a PhD candidate at Cambridge, working on dynastic anxieties and the Roman imperial succession in Shakespeare. Beside the uses and abuses of classical history, her academic interests include Roman women and the reception of Classics in the 20th century. She has written for several non-academic publications, including The Oxford Review of Books and Cunning Folk Magazine. Email: rvs28@cam.ac.uk

ALEX SILVERMAN has recently returned to academia, undertaking an MPhil at the University of Bristol, and (currently) a DPhil at Oxford, researching the reception of ancient dramatic choruses in music. He is also an award-winning Composer and Musical Director who has made music for shows in many of the UK’s major playhouses, including a dozen at Shakespeare’s Globe, and in 20 countries worldwide. Alex has been Composer and Music Director for the Cambridge University Greek Plays since 2010, and has contributed to projects on performance of Greek chorus by Barefaced Greek and Live Canon, including workshops and conferences at UBC, Harvard, UGA, and Oxford’s APGRD. Email: alexsilverman.co.uk

JEREMY SWIST is a lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University, having previously taught at Miami University and Xavier University. He holds a BA in Latin and History from the University of Maine, and an MA and PhD. in Classics from the University of Iowa. He has published on historiography, rhetoric, philosophy, and medicine under the Roman Empire, as well as the reception of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium in heavy metal music, including a chapter on Sparta in the forthcoming Cambridge Companion to Metal Music. He is on Twitter @MetalClassicist. Email: jeremyswist@brandeis.edu

NEBO TODOROVIC After receiving his BA in Classics and Ancient Near-Eastern Studies from University of Pavia and an MA in Classics from the University College of London, Nebo joined Yale’s Department of Comparative Literature in the Fall of 2016. He focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in contemporary Italian and Yugoslav literatures, with a theoretical focus on notions of trauma, testimony, and translation. Under the supervision of Emily Greenwood and Moira Fradinger, he is writing a dissertation that analyzes adaptations of ancient Greek tragedy staged during the violent break-up of former Yugoslavia. The archive that I assemble includes classical tragedies adapted for theatre and film in the former Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy, that take the Yugoslav wars as their thematic backdrop. Email: nebojsa.todorovic@yale.edu

LIEN VAN GEEL is originally from Belgium and is a sixth year PhD candidate in the Classics program at Columbia University in the City of New York. She is interested in Augustan poetry, gender studies, and reception. Her dissertation is titled "Augustus' sister: Octavia Minor's lives and afterlives," in which she examines the different and changing narratives and literary representations of Octavia during the triumviral period and beyond. Email: lv2371@columbia.edu

SOPHIE WARDLE is a doctoral candidate in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores Victorian responses to London’s Roman past. Her work asks how archaeological discoveries from Londinium became entwined in modern lives; how they were incorporated into negotiations of personal and civic identity; and, how, as the material traces of lost lives and a fallen civilisation, they enabled individuals and institutions to confront their own legacies. She is particularly interested in locating the forgotten responses of London’s mudlarks and construction workers—the city’s accidental archaeologists. Email: slmw2@cam.ac.uk