School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 31-40 of 74 Results
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Christopher Krebs
Gesue and Helen Spogli Professor of Italian Studies, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of German Studies and of Comparative Literature
BioChristopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, Ph. D. 2003), and Oxford (M. St. 2002). He was a lecturer at University College (Oxford) and an assistant (2004-09) and then associate professor (2009-12) at the department of the Classics at Harvard, before he joined the Classics department at Stanford. In the spring of 2007 he was the professeur invité at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris), in 2008/9 the APA fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich (on which see his “You say putator” in the TLS), and, most recently, the recipient of the Christian Gauss Book Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society.
His publications include Negotiatio Germaniae. Tacitus’ Germania und Enea Silvio Piccolomini, Giannantonio Campano, Conrad Celtis und Heinrich Bebel (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), and A most dangerous book. Tacitus’s Germania from the Roman Empire to the Third Reich (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), which has or will be translated into six languages. He has also co-edited a volume on Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The ‘Plupast’ from Herodotus to Appian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). He is currently preparing a commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 7 as well as an intellectual history of the late Roman Republic (with W.W. Norton); he is also co-editing the Cambridge Companion to Caesar. Other long-term projects and interests focus on Posidonius, Sallust and Tacitus, Latin lexicography, Thersites and Prometheus, and Annio di Viterbo.
He organized and co-chaired a seminar on Classical Traditions at Harvard Humanities Center, where he also co-hosted a conference on “The Reception of Odysseus in Literature, Art, and Music” (April 2009). He co-organized a conference on “The historians’ Plupast” (2006), an APA Panel on “Caesar the ‘Litterator’” (January 2012), and a conference on “Caesar: Writer, Speaker and Linguist,” at Amherst College (September 2012). He will deliver the third annual Herbert W. Benario lecture in Roman Studies (at Emory University) in the fall of 2013 and the forty-third Skotheim Lecture in History (at Whitman College) in the spring of 2014. In the summer of 2014 he will co-teach in France a seminar on Caesar in Gaul for the Paideia Institute.
Most recent and forthcoming articles include: “Annum quiete et otio transiit: Tacitus (Agr. 6.3) and Sallust on liberty, tyranny, and human dignity” (A Companion to Tacitus), “M. Manlius Capitolinus: the metaphorical plupast and metahistorical reflections” (The historians’ Plupast), “Caesar, Lucretius and the dates of De Rerum Natura and the Commentarii” (Classical Quarterly), and “Caesar’s Sisenna” (Classical Quarterly).
In 2012-13 he will offer the following courses: Advanced Latin: Cicero and Sallust on Catiline; Reinventing the Other: Greeks, Romans, Barbarians (cross-listed in Anthropology); a freshman seminar Eloquence Personified: How to Speak Like Cicero; and a graduate seminar on Sallust and Virgil. In 2013-14 he will offer graduate seminars on The fragmentary Roman Historians and Lucan and the poetics of civil war, advanced Greek: Attic Orators and advanced Latin: Tacitus. He also teaches at Stanford Continuing Studies: a course on Tacitus (Tacitus: Character Assassin, Satirist, and Trenchant Historian) in the winter term, and a course on Lucan (The Dark Genius: Lucan, his civil war epos, and the court of Nero) in the spring. -
Justin Leidwanger
Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Oceans
BioJustin Leidwanger's research focuses on Mediterranean mobilities and connectivity, maritime livelihoods, and their heritage. Ships and ports are central to exploring these themes, providing evidence for the long-term dynamics that shaped coastal communities economically, socially, and politically. He is drawn to the long arc of the Roman Mediterranean, especially its temporal edges, from the emergence of Hellenistic states to the long Late Antiquity and beyond. Through a focus on diverse but co-dependent seaborne interactions that have and continue to define the Mediterranean, this work aligns critical engagement with the past, advocacy for local communities in the present, and sustainable development for the future.
Current collaborative fieldwork in Sardinia with the University of Sassari examines the socio-environmental dynamics spanning three millennia of tuna trap fisheries (tonnare). In Croatia, joint excavation with the Croatian Conservation Institute of a wreck carrying a high-ranking individual and perhaps a goldsmith around 700 CE sheds new light on the transformation of interactions at the end of antiquity (featured in National Geographic, Reuters, and elsewhere). A maritime landscape survey with Dokuz Eylül University in southwest Türkiye explores the impacts of early Hellenistic sociopolitical shifts on local economies and mobilities.
Previously, Justin co-directed investigations (2011-2015) at the Archaic through Late Antique harbors of Burgaz (“Old Knidos”) in Türkiye, and led excavations (2013-2019) of the 6th-century Marzamemi 2 “church wreck” off Sicily, which carried 100 tons of marble architectural elements. Work in Sicily continues through 3D and other analyses of the assemblage as well as immersive museum-based and other heritage initiatives that link past and present. One facet of this work mobilizes archaeology to understand the creation and circulation of plastics as maritime material assemblages, offering a new vantage point on socio-environmental systems. Another uses archaeology to foreground heritage activism through the spaces, materialities, and memories of forced and undocumented migration across these waters.
On campus, he teaches courses and advises students on topics in Hellenistic, Roman, and Late Antique archaeology, Mediterranean heritage, economies and interaction, port networks, ceramic production and exchange, archaeological theory, and Greco-Roman architecture and engineering. The Maritime Archaeology & Digital Heritage Lab (MEDLab) at the Archaeology Center serves as a fieldwork base and collaborative resource for shipwreck and harbor archaeology, digital modeling (structured light scanning, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, network visualization), and pottery analysis (petrography, pXRF, computational morphological analysis, finite element method, experimental archaeology).
Author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of various volumes, including Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge), Regional Economies in Action (Vienna), and Across the Shore: Integrating Perspective on Maritime Heritage (Springer), he is currently working on two books. The first, Fluid Technologies: Innovation on the Ancient Mediterranean, examines the interdependence of maritime logistics in Greco-Roman economies, from transport amphora standardization to changes in ship design and port infrastructure. The second, The Tuna Trap, uses the distinctive practices surrounding community fisheries to shed light on the entanglement of human and non-human mobilities across central Mediterranean waters. -
Mengyao Liu
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2022
Ph.D. Minor, Computer ScienceBioI am broadly interested in the production of knowledge in ancient worlds, with a particular interest in the Greco-Roman and Chinese traditions. My curiosity is a comparative and genealogical one at root: by comparing different societies, I seek to grasp the historicity of intellectual practices and the ideas thus produced. Currently, my research interest focuses on astronomy and astrology in Ancient Greece and China.
While completing my B.A. in Classics at Sorbonne University, I investigated how the urban metamorphoses of Rome materialized the transformation of the political regime. My master's thesis at EHESS, "Statues pour les corps, livres pour les mots" : La vie (βἰος) et la rhétorique (λόγος) dans les Discours Sacrés, offers insight into the psychosomatic relations conceived by the Greeks. The inquiry breaks into two interdependent questions: the therapeutic usage of rhetorical practices and the unconventional representation of Asclepius in the Sacred Tales of Aristides.
Having one year of training in software engineering from Tsinghua University, I am also passionate about the potentials of digital humanities.
