School of Humanities and Sciences
Showing 1-50 of 97 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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Sinead Brennan-McMahon
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2019
BioSinead is an ABD PhD candidate in the Department of Classics and is expecting to complete her dissertation in 2024. Her research investigates ancient Roman sexual culture and where it shows up in the landscape. It focuses on displays of sexuality that do not match up to any social or political identities, including statues of Priapus, emperors portrayed as sexual aggressors and agricultural language adopted as sexual slang.
Sinead comes from Auckland, New Zealand, where she received her M.A. with First Class Honours. Her M.A. thesis examined the reception of Martial’s sexually obscene homosexual epigrams in school texts and commentaries. Using a comprehensive statistical analysis, she argued that Victorian editors of Martial’s Epigrams expurgated the text to remove references to material they found offensive and to curate a culturally appropriate view of the ancient world for their schoolboy readers.
Sinead is also interested in the Digital Humanities, Data Science and programming. As a CESTA DH Graduate Fellow, she is developing an ngram viewer tool for the Latin literary canon. -
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
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 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.
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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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James Flynn
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2023
Current Research and Scholarly InterestsJamie Flynn is a PhD student in Ancient History. He focuses on the cultural, religious, and economic history of the eastern Mediterranean during the Hellenistic and Roman periods, ancient India and its connection with Mediterranean societies, and the historical impact of climate change on the ancient world. As an undergrad, he researched the economic history of warfare in the Greek and Roman worlds. His undergraduate thesis compared contemporary trends among Hellenistic philosophers and Indian ascetics of withdrawing from society. During his M.A. degree, he worked on the Yale Nile Initiative, an interdisciplinary group of historians and scientists studying climate change in antiquity, where he covered South Asia. He also worked on digitally documenting Greek epigraphy from Dura Europos and has an ongoing interest in the digital humanities. He studies the Indian languages Sanskrit and Pali in addition to Latin and Greek.
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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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Dillon Gisch
Research Assistant, Classics
BioDillon Gisch recently received his PhD in Classical Archaeology from Stanford University. His research investigates how images of "modest Venus" from central Italy, coastal western Turkey, and coastal Syria engendered a diverse array of contextual significances for viewers in the ancient world, despite being classified as "replicas" by modern viewers. He also studies the provenance histories and historiographies of these images and other "replicated" ancient art, especially related to issues of gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. He has broad interests in visual culture; the historiography of art; social archaeology and art history; collecting, museum, and heritage ethics; empire and cultural appropriation; catalogs and cataloging practices; and legacy data analysis.
Previously, he received his BA in Classical Studies and Art History with Distinction (summa cum laude) from the University of Washington (Seattle) and his MA in Anthropology from Stanford University. He has worked as a gallerist of early modern and modern (1450–1970) European, American, and Japanese graphic art on paper at Davidson Galleries in Seattle. He has also excavated in central Italy at the ancient Etruscan site of Poggio Civitate (Murlo) and the ancient Roman site of Cosa.
The Europe Center and the American Academy in Rome have featured portions of his ongoing dissertation research. -
Kevin Khadavi
Undergraduate, Classics
BioI'm a member of the Class of 2026 at Stanford University, studying classics, history, and politics. I’m a seasoned public speaker with experience in speechwriting, research (both in the sciences and humanities), debate, and communication.
I’m a published author of historical papers and have undertaken numerous oral history projects with prominent historical figures, including Vice President Walter F. Mondale and Freedom Rider Jerome Smith; the topics of my work range from the 2nd Russo-Persian War to the 1963 meeting between James Baldwin and Robert Kennedy. I also have experience lecturing on military history.
I am deeply passionate about addressing societal challenges in our country and around the world. I care particularly about education inequality—what I believe is the root of many other societal problems—and am devoting time and energy to this cause through my work with RFK Human Rights and the Memorial Foundation.
In my free time, I enjoy listening to historical speeches (RFK’s Cleveland City Club Address is my favorite), reading Stoic philosophy, and jumping into Stanford’s fountains. I’m fascinated by spaceflight and am a big fan of Transcendental poetry. -
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 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. -
Mengyao Liu
Ph.D. Student in Classics, admitted Autumn 2022
BioI 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.
