School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-30 of 30 Results
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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.
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Aaron Diamond Brown
Lecturer, Classics
Collections Associate, ArchaeologyBioAaron 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
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
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David Cohen
WSD-HANDA Professor of Human Rights and International Justice and Senior Fellow, by courtesy, at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
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.
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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.
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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.
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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. -
Richard Martin
Anthony E. and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor of Classics
BioI have taught for 26 years at Stanford; previously, I taught 18 years at Princeton. I am working on several books, concerning Homeric religion; Aristophanes; and comparative epic poetry.
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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.
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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.
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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
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"
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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
Associate Professor of Classics, of African and African American Studies and, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
BioGrant Parker joined Stanford in 2006, having taught previously at Duke University. He has long researched and taught Latin literature and Roman imperial culture, e.g. The Making of Roman India (2008). Other publications include The Agony of Asar: a former slave's defence of slavery, 1742 (2001) and, as editor, South Africa, Greece, Rome: classical confrontations (2017). Since 2025 he has also taught African Studies in the newly constituted Department of African and African American Studies. As a comparative global humanist, his interest in monuments, collective memory and their media is expressed by several articles on obelisks and statues. Another ongoing theme is enslavement and its aftermaths, ancient and modern. Current work engages monument-mindedness in Southern Africa as well as the global reception of Virgil's poetry. His many roles on campus have included the Stanford Archaeology Center, the Center for African Studies, and Residential Education.
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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
Victoria and Roger Sant Professor of Art and Professor, 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.
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Walter Scheidel
Dickason Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History
BioPersonal website: http://www.walterscheidel.com
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Michael Shanks
Professor of Classics
BioProfessor at Stanford University, Michael Shanks is one of the most original and influential of contemporary archaeologists. He has been at the forefront of archaeological thought and practice since the 1980s, pioneering new ways of understanding and explaining, engaging with Graeco-Roman antiquity and European prehistory, mobilizing remains of the past all around us — instigating changes in archaeology and how we all work with remains of the past. A specialist in long-term perspectives on design and creativity, innovation and social change, he explores connections across the sciences, humanities, and arts in research collaborations and outreach through and beyond the academy, tapping more than $32m of funding over the last 25 years.
Current projects
MS is currently completing four long-running and interrelated projects.
Archaeological history — building scenarios.
Greece and Rome: a new model of antiquity. With Gary Devore. A project concerned with how one might conceive of antiquity as a kind of archaeological prehistory, retold through speculative fabulation. Against conventional narrative is offered a model of ancient lifeworlds conveyed through 45 personae and scenarios. Estimated delivery end of 2026.
Archaeological sites — encountering location.
Against place: a border archaeology. Based on archaeological itineraries in the northern borders of England/Scotland, including prehistoric and Roman field research, this project explores border crossings, trespass and transgression in questioning the character of space and place, site and region. Estimated delivery 2027.
Archaeological praxis — performance design.
Theatre/Archaeology: performing remains. With Mike Pearson. This book sums up 30 years of collaboration with performance artist Mike Pearson. In five portfolios of case studies in performance design they set out a pragmatics and methodology of deep mapping contemporary antiquity and prehistory. Estimated delivery end of 2025.
Archaeological actuality — for the future.
Archaeologies of Nature in Art: from Landscape to Climate Breakdown. With Gabriella Giannachi. This project mobilizes an archaeology of arts practices, from prehistory to contemporary art, to offer action-oriented responses to climate change in a reframing of the concept of nature. Estimated delivery autumn 2025.
The following is part of his continuing exploration of Applied Archaeology — design foresight.
Project Athena: Innovation in and through Learning. With Aisin Corporation led by Kenji Suzuki and in collaboration with Kimihiko Iwamura. Developing learning community and competencies in creative pragmatics — designing and implementing a strategy of corporate culture change. Ongoing 2025 – 2026. -
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.
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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
Associate Professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and, by courtesy, of Classics
BioResearch Areas:
- The Chinese family
- Comparative study of antiquity
- Reception of classical traditions in modern China
