School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-30 of 30 Results

  • Hans Bork

    Hans Bork

    Assistant Professor of Classics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsMy research concerns how Latin and Greek speakers express personal identity, especially social class, ethnicity, and cultural affiliation, through individual idiom. The culture we reconstruct in Classics is founded on an aggregate of individuals speaking loudly or quietly or not at all, depending on circumstance, but language in use always flickers between personal impulse and societal demand—a negotiation that fascinates me, as it is universal, but never has the same result.

  • Aaron Diamond Brown

    Aaron Diamond Brown

    Lecturer

    BioAaron Brown is an archaeologist specializing in Roman and Italic material culture with particular interests in ancient foodways (i.e. the practices and beliefs surrounding the production and consumption of food and drink), craft production and the life histories of artifacts, the Roman household, and the lived experiences of the non-elite. Much of his research seeks to recover the daily realities of ancient persons’ lives in order to better understand large-scale social structures and how they changed over time. His current book project is a social and material history of cooking in the Roman Empire.

    He serves as the assistant director of the Pompeii Artifact Life History Project (PALHIP) and a ceramic specialist for the Pompeii I.14 project. He has also worked at the following sites in Italy: Rofalco, Cetamura del Chianti, Cerveteri, Morgantina, and Oplontis.

  • Giovanna Ceserani

    Giovanna Ceserani

    Professor of Classics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsIntellectual history, data science in the humanities, ancient and modern historiography, history of archaeology, early modern travels and explorations of the past

  • David Cohen

    David Cohen

    WSD-HANDA Professor of Human Rights and International Justice and Professor of Environmental Social Sciences

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsCurrent research includes book projects on World War II war crimes trials; the Tokyo and Nuremberg International Military Tribunals; analysis of blasphemy prosecutions in Indonesia; analysis of the misuse of electronic communication, criminal defamation, lese majeste, blasphemy and asspociated laws in Southeast Asia; international best practices on whistleblower protection and justiuce collaborators in corruption cases in ASEAN; the UN justice process in East Timor under the Special Panels for Serious Crimes; comparative study of strategic decision making in American, British, and Japanese policy circles in WWII; analysis of the Judgment in Case 002/2 at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia.

  • Sarah Derbew

    Sarah Derbew

    Assistant Professor of Classics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsSarah Derbew's research focuses on the literary and artistic representations of black people in ancient Greece. The genres she investigates include ancient Greek tragedy, historiography, satire, and the novel. She also examines artistic renderings of black people in Greek antiquity, focusing on both the objects themselves and the museums in which they are displayed. Her interests extend to the twenty-first century; she has written about the reception of Greco-Roman antiquity in Africa and the African diaspora.

  • Charlotte Fonrobert

    Charlotte Fonrobert

    Associate Professor of Religious Studies and, by courtesy, of Classics and of German Studies

    BioCharlotte Elisheva Fonrobert specializes in Judaism: talmudic literature and culture. Her interests include gender in Jewish culture; the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity; the discourses of orthodoxy versus heresy; the connection between religion and space; and rabbinic conceptions of Judaism with respect to GrecoRoman culture. She is the author of Menstrual Purity: Rabbinic and Christian Reconstructions of Biblical Gender(2000), which won the Salo Baron Prize for a best first book in Jewish Studies of that year and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in Jewish Scholarship. She also co-edited The Cambridge Companion to the Talmud and Rabbinic Literature (2007), together with Martin Jaffee (University of Washington). Currently, she is working on a manuscript entitled Replacing the Nation: Judaism, Diaspora and the Neighborhood.

  • Christopher Krebs

    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

    Justin Leidwanger

    Associate Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Oceans

    BioJustin Leidwanger's work focuses on Mediterranean mobilities, interaction, and maritime heritage. Ships and ports, especially in southeast Sicily and southwest Turkey, are central to exploring these themes in the field, providing evidence for connections and the long-term dynamics that shaped communities amid the economically, socially, and politically changing worlds from the rise of Rome through late antiquity and beyond.

    Between 2013 and 2019, he led investigations of the 6th-century Marzamemi 2 “church wreck” (Sicily), which sank while carrying nearly 100 tons of marble architectural elements. Work continues through underwater survey, 3D analysis, and publication as well as immersive museum-based and pop-up exhibits and other initiatives. Project 'U Mari extends this collaborative and community-based field research across southeast Sicily, interrogating the heritage of diverse but co-dependent interactions with and across the sea that have long defined the central Mediterranean. These connections offer a resource for deeper critical engagement with the past, more meaningful identities in the present, and more sustainable development in the future. One facet of this work examines the socioeconomic dynamics spanning three millennia of tuna fishing through maritime landscape archaeology and documentation of the fading material culture and traditional knowledge of the mattanza. Another mobilizes archaeology to better understand the creation and circulation of plastics as maritime material assemblages, offering a window into socio-environmental systems. These efforts simultaneously foreground heritage activism through community-based archaeology of the spaces, materialities, and memories of contemporary journeys of forced and undocumented migration across these waters.

    Justin 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, 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 digital modeling (structured light scanning, laser scanning, photogrammetry, GIS, network analysis) and pottery analysis (petrography, pXRF, computational morphological analysis).

    Author of Roman Seas: A Maritime Archaeology of Eastern Mediterranean Economies (Oxford), and editor or co-editor of five more volumes, including Regional Economies in Action (Vienna) and Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World (Cambridge), he is currently working on two books. The first, entitled Fluid Technologies: Innovation on the Ancient Mediterranean, arises from research with students in the field, lab, and museum, analyzing transport amphoras, port infrastructure, and other clues to ancient technologies of distribution. The second, The Tuna Trap, explores the entanglement of mobilities that have and continue to bind the shores surrounding the Strait of Sicily.

  • Richard Martin

    Richard Martin

    Anthony E. and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics

    BioI have taught for 19 years at Stanford; previously, I taught 18 years at Princeton. I am working on several books, concerning Homeric religion; Aristophanes; and comparative epic poetry.

  • Jody Maxmin

    Jody Maxmin

    Associate Professor of Art and Art History and of Classics

    BioProf. Maxmin's research includes Greek painting and sculpture, archaic Greek Art, the Art and Culture of 5th century Athens, classical influence on later art, athletics in ancient Greece.

  • Ian Morris

    Ian Morris

    Jean and Rebecca Willard Endowed Professor of Classics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsUsing long-term history to identify the big trends that have shaped society across the last 100,000 years, and analyzing how those trends might play out in the future.

  • Reviel Netz

    Reviel Netz

    Patrick Suppes Professor of Greek Mathematics and Astronomy and Professor, by courtesy, of Philosophy and of History

    BioNetz's main field is the history of pre-modern mathematics. His research involves the wider issues of the history of cognitive practices, e.g. visual culture, the history of the book, and literacy and numeracy. His books from Cambridge University Press include The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: a Study in Cognitive History (1999, Runciman Award), The Transformation of Early Mediterranean Mathematics: From Problems to Equations (2004), and Ludic Proof: Greek Mathematics and the Alexandrian Aesthetic (2009).

    He is also the author of the translation and commentary of the works of Archimedes, also with CUP, a three-volume work of which the first has appeared, The Two Books on Sphere and Cylinder (2004). Together with Nigel Wilson, he prepares the edition of the recently rediscovered Archimedes Palimpsest (evidence from which already gave rise to two major discoveries: a text showing actual infinity in Archimedes, published in SCIAMVS 2001-2002, and a text showing, possibly, combinatorics in Archimedes, published in SCIAMVS 2004.) Two volumes, Transcription and Critical Edition, are forthcoming from the British Academy, of which the transcription is already available online. His popular book on the Archimedes Palimpsest Project, The Archimedes Codex, (co-authored with William Noel, Neumann Prize) was published by Widenfeld and Nicolson, 2007, and is translated into 20 languages.

    Related to his research in cognitive history is his interest in ecological history, and he has published Barbed Wire: an Ecology of Modernity (Wesleyan University Press, 2004, finalist for PEN award). Reviel Netz is also a poet (Adayin Bahuc, 1999 Shufra: Tel Aviv, AMOS prize), one of a group of Hebrew poets active today whose work revives formal verse and he is the co-author, together with his wife, the Israeli author Maya Arad, of a collection of essays on Israeli literature, Positions of Stress (Meqom Hata'am, 2008 Axuzat Bayit: Tel Aviv).

  • Andrea Nightingale

    Andrea Nightingale

    Professor of Classics, Emerita

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am completing a book entitled "Eros and Epiphany: Plato on the Soul's Ascent to Divine Beings"

  • Josiah Ober

    Josiah Ober

    Markos & Eleni Kounalakis Chair in Honor of Constantine Mitsotakis, Professor of Political Science, Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Professor of Classics and, by courtesy, of Philosophy

    BioJosiah Ober, the Constantine Mitsotakis Chair in the School of Humanities and Sciences, specializes in the areas of ancient and modern political theory and historical institutionalism. His primary appointment is in Political Science; he holds a secondary appointment in the Classics and courtesy appointments in Philosophy and the Hoover Institution. His most recent books are The Greeks and the Rational: The discovery of practical reason (University of CaliforniaPress 2022) and Demopolis: Democracy before liberalism in theory and practice Cambridge University Press 2017). His ongoing work focuses on rationality (ancient and modern), the theory and practice of democracy, and the politics of knowledge and innovation, Recent articles and working papers address AI ethics, socio-political systems, economic growth and inequality, the relationship between democracy and dignity, and the aggregation of expertise.

    He is author or co-author of about 100 articles and chapters (many available on his Academia.edu page) and several other books, including Fortress Attica (1985), Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens (1989), The Athenian Revolution (1996), Political Dissent in Democratic Athens (1998), Athenian Legacies 2005), Democracy and Knowledge (2008), and The Rise and Fall of Classical Greece (2015). He has held residential fellowships at the National Humanities Center, Center for Hellenic Studies, Univ. of New England (Australia), Clare Hall (Cambridge), Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences , and Univ. of Sydney; research fellowships from the ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim; and has been a visiting professor at University of Michigan, Paris I-Sorbonne, UC-Irvine, and UC-Berkeley. Before coming to Stanford he taught at Montana State University (1980-1990) and Princeton University (1990-2006).

  • Grant Parker

    Grant Parker

    Associate Professor of Classics, of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature

    BioGrant Parker joined Stanford from Duke University in 2006. He teaches Latin and other topics in Roman imperial culture; he has worked on the history of collecting and on historical maps. His books include The Making of Roman India (2008) and The Agony of Asar: a former slave's defence of slavery, 1742 (2001). He has edited a major volume, South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (forthcoming 2016/7). Current research projects focus on memorialization and public history, in both Rome and South Africa (including comparison).

  • Michael Penn

    Michael Penn

    Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Classics

    BioMichael Penn, the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor of Religious Studies, is a specialist in the history of early Christianity with a particular focus on middle eastern Christians who wrote in the Aramaic dialect of Syriac.

    Professor Penn’s first book, Kissing Christians: Ritual and Community in the Late Ancient Church, was published in 2005 by the University of Pennsylvania Press. In 2015 he published two books on Christian-Muslim relations: Envisioning Islam: Syriac Christians in the Early Muslim World (University of Pennsylvania Press) and When Christians First Met Muslims: A Source Book of the Earliest Syriac Writings on Islam (University of California Press). For these projects Professor Penn has received awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council for Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, the British Academy, the American Philosophical Association, the American Academy of Religion, and the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning.

    Professor Penn is currently working on an Andrew Mellon Foundation funded collaboration that uses recent advances in the computerized analysis of handwriting to help analyze ancient Aramaic manuscripts. In addition to this work in the digital humanities, Professor Penn has begun several related projects that focus on the history of Syriac Christianity and the manuscripts they produced.

    Before joining Stanford, Professor Penn was on the faculty of Mount Holyoke College. He has also taught at Brandeis University, Haverford College, Bryn Mawr College, and Duke University. He has additional experience as a secondary school teacher, including six years as the director of forensics at Durham Academy High School, where he ran a nationally competitive policy debate team. Professor Penn has also held research positions at Apple Computers, the Weizmann Institute (Israel), the Palo Alto Veterans Hospital, and Ames Research Center, NASA.

    Ph.D. (Religion) Duke University (1999)
    A.B. (Molecular Biology) Princeton University (1993)

  • Bissera Pentcheva

    Bissera Pentcheva

    Professor of Art and Art History and, by courtesy, of Classics

    BioBissera Pentcheva's work focuses on Byzantium and the medieval Mediterranean, more specifically aesthetics, phenomenology, and acoustics. Her most recent book Hagia Sophia: Sound, Space and Spirit in Byzantium (Penn State University Press 2017) explores the interconnection among acoutsics, architecture, and liturgical rite. She has also edited, Aural Architecture in Byzantium: Music, Acoustics and Ritual (Ashgate, 2017). Pentcheva has published another two books with Pennsylvania State University Press: Icons and Power: The Mother of God in Byzantium, 2006 that won the John Nicholas Brown prize form the Medieval Academy of America in 2010 and The Sensual Icon: Space, Ritual, and the Senses in Byzantium, 2010. She has held a number of prestigious fellowships among them: J. S Guggenheim, American Academy of Rome, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Mellon New Directions Fellowship for the study of Classical Arabic, Alexander von Humboldt (Germany), Onassis Foundation (Greece), Dumbarton Oaks, and Columbia University's Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship. Her work has been published at the Art Bulletin, Speculum, Gesta, and Res. Anthropology and Aesthetics, and Convivium.

  • Michael Shanks

    Michael Shanks

    Professor of Classics

    BioResearch interests:

    design history and research; archaeological theory; heritage studies and archaeologies of the contemporary past; the archaeology of Grece-Roman urbanism; the regional archaeology of the English-Scottish borders.

    Recent books:

    Archaeology in the making: conversations through a discipline. Edited with Bill Rathje and Chris Witmore. Routledge 2013.

    Archaeology: the discipline of things. With Bjørnar Olsen, Tim Webmoor and Chris Witmore. University of California Press, 2012.

    The archaeological imagination. Left Coast Press, 2012.

    Archaeologies of presence: art, performance and the persistence of being. Edited with Nick Kaye and Gabriella Giannachi. Routledge, 2012.

    Current projects:

    An archaeology of antiquity. With Gary Devore. For Oxford University Press.

    The Revs Program at Stanford. Automotive archaeology.

    From Tyne to Tweed. An archaeology of the English-Scottish borders, including excavations of the Roman town of Binchester.

    http://mshanks.com

  • Jennifer Trimble

    Jennifer Trimble

    Associate Professor of Classics

    BioJennifer Trimble works on the visual and material culture of the Roman Empire, with interests in portraits and replication, the visual culture of Roman slavery, comparative urbanism, and ancient mapping. Her book on Women and Visual Replication in Roman Imperial Art and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2011) explores the role of visual sameness in constructing public identity and articulating empire and place. Trimble was co-director of the IRC-Oxford-Stanford excavations in the Roman Forum (now being prepared for publication), focused on the interactions of commercial, religious and monumental space. She also co-directed Stanford's Digital Forma Urbis Romae Project, a collaboration between computer scientists and archaeologists to help reassemble a fragmentary ancient map of the city of Rome.

  • Caroline Winterer

    Caroline Winterer

    William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, Professor of History and, by courtesy, of Classics and of Education

    BioCaroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of History and American Studies, and Professor by courtesy of Classics. She specializes in American history before 1900, especially the history of ideas, political thought, and the history of science.

    She teaches classes on American history until 1900, including American cultural and intellectual history, the American Enlightenment, and the history of science.

    She is the author of six books, including most recently How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America (Princeton University Press, 2024).

    She is currently accepting graduate students. For more information on the PhD program in the Department of History, visit: https://history.stanford.edu/academics/graduate-degree-programs.

  • Yiqun Zhou

    Yiqun Zhou

    Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and, by courtesy, of Classics

    BioResearch Areas:
    - Chinese and comparative women’s history

    - Early Chinese literature

    - Ming-Qing fiction

    - China-Greece comparative studies

    -Reception of classical antiquity in modern China