CLASSICS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Professor of Jewish Studies and
Bice is a Classical archaeologist specializing in the material culture of pre-Roman Italy. Her research focuses on the construction of cultural identity and the mechanics of cultural exchange in Apulia before the Roman conquest. Using artifacts -in particular local and imported pottery- as her main form of evidence, she aims to give a voice to individuals who would be otherwise mute, as they have left no written accounts and are only tangentially described in Greek and Roman sources. She has fieldwork and finds research experience in a number of sites in Italy (from Roman villas in Veneto, to Tarquinia's necropolis, to Pompeii), in Greece, and in Turkey. She has published on Etruscans and Apulian tombs and on Corinthian pottery. Her current book project is a social biography of the inhabitants of Central Apulia. At Rutgers, Professor Peruzzi teaches courses on Mediterranean archaeology.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics ( Ph.D., Harvard )
Research Interests: Ancient cultural history; Archaic Greek epic and Attic drama, Greek mythology, religion and gender; reception.
Emmanuel Aprilakis is a PhD candidate in Classics at Rutgers University. He earned his B.A. summa cum laude in Classical Studies from the Macaulay Honors College at CUNY Hunter College in 2015, where he wrote an honors thesis entitled "Human Suffering and the Question of the Gods' Justice on Lemnos and in Uz." Emmanuel has developed a deep interest in dramatic choral performance, which has engendered his dissertation entitled "The Figure of the Koryphaios in Ancient Drama." Emmanuel's broader research interests include ancient athletics, ancient diet, vase painting, sculpture, and museum ethics.
Emmanuel has presented his research at a variety of conferences both in the States, including at the SCS and CAAS, and abroad, in Oxford, St. Andrews, and Coimbra. At the annual meeting of the CAC in 2017, he received the award for best graduate paper for his work on the chorus of Menander's Dyskolos. An avid traveler, Emmanuel spent the summer of 2016 as Bert Hodge Hill Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He spent the summer of 2019 visiting every Roman theater in Spain thanks to an Andrew W. Mellon Summer Study Grant. At Rutgers, Emmanuel has taught courses in Latin, Greek, and ancient athletics. He also co-organized the conference "Food and Drink in the Ancient World."
Isaiah Clough earned his BA in Classics from the University of Arizona. He returned and completed his MA in Classics in 2010. His research interests include Greek and Latin poetry, especially epic and Latin love poetry, as well as the work of Petronius.
Job Titles:
- Department Chair
- Professor of Classics ( Ph.D., University of Chicago ) Research
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor ( Ph.D., University of Pennsylvania )
Job Titles:
- Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics ( Ph.D., Princeton ) Research
Kate Hildreth earned her B.A. in Classical Languages and Literature from Dartmouth College in 2017. After graduating, she spent four years teaching second grade in public schools in New York City. During her time teaching, she also earned an M.A.T. from Relay Graduate School of Education. Kate joined Rutgers Classics as a Master's candidate in 2021. Her current research interests include Greek and Latin poetry, especially Greek tragedy.
Kate Stevens earned their BA in Latin and Greek Literature at Oberlin College in 2016, where they wrote an undergraduate thesis focused on Catullan intertexts in Martial Epigrams Book 9. Kate joined Rutgers Classics as a PhD student in 2017, and has presented at Latinfest and CAAS. Their interests lie primarily in the literature of the Roman imperial period (with an emphasis on Latin epigram) as well as epigraphy, paleography, and ancient magic.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Teaching Professor / Research
Luke Madson joined the Classics Department in 2018 after receiving his B.A. in Classics and History from Knox College and his M.A. in Classics from Villanova University. He was a Regular Member (2021-2022) at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) as the recipient of the Thomas Day Seymour Fellowship and an Associate Member at the ASCSA (2022-2023) as recipient of the Eugene Vanderpool Advanced Fellowship. This coming academic year (2023-2024), Luke will be conducting research at the University of Tübingen, supported through a one-year doctoral grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).
Luke has participated in the Gennadius Library Medieval Greek Summer Session at the ASCSA (2021), the Summer School at the American Academy in Rome (2019), and the ASCSA Summer Session (2016). He is currently involved in field excavations at Corinth (2022 and 2023) and field survey with the Small Cycladic Island Project (2022 and 2023); he has also excavated at the Athenian Agora and with the Eastern Boeotia Archaeological Project at ancient Eleon (2018).
Luke's dissertation is a study of political subversion in Athens during the 5 th and 4 th century BCE. The provisional title is:"Μισῶ Λακωνίζειν: A Cultural History of Laconism in Classical Athens."
Meredith joined Rutgers in 2021 after completing the Post-Baccalaureate program in Classics at Columbia University. Coming from a background in corporate marketing strategy, she is excited now to be pursuing her Master's degree in Classics. Her primary interest focuses on Greek women's intimate lives, specifically wellness practices and perinatal care.
Molly Mata earned a BBA in Business Management at Angelo State University in 2009, and after working for several years in the property tax field, rediscovered her love of literature and language and completed a B.A. in classical studies and humanities at UTSA in 2014. She then earned an M.A. in comparative literature and cultural studies (with a classics concentration) at the University of New Mexico in May 2018, and joined Rutgers Classics the same year. Molly wrote her M.A. Thesis, titled "Drama as Dream: Sophoclean Tragedy and the Cult of Asclepius," on drama as a corresponding ritual to incubation in the cult of Asclepius. Molly participated in the American School for Classical Studies summer seminar "Finding the Spartans" in 2019, and has presented at CAMWS conferences (2016-2018) and Temple University's consortium on women and healing (2019).& nbsp; her research interests lie primarily in Greek poetry and drama, ancient medicine, Greek religion, and Roman Comedy, and especially how these segments of ancient life and literary genres imagined the mind, body, and emotions.
Becca McGinn completed her BA in Classical Civilization at Yale University. Before joining Rutgers Classics in the Fall of 2017, she completed an MA in Classical Archaeology with a Specialization in Museum Theory and Practice at Florida State University. She received both the CAMWS 2013-2014 Excavation/Field School Award and the Etruscan Foundation 2014 Fieldwork Fellowship to participate in the excavations at Cetamura del Chianti. She has presented in Greek Fest at Columbia University and Latin Fest at the University of Pennsylvania. She will be presenting at the CAAS Fall 2019 Meeting on memory in Vergil's Fifth Eclogue. Her research interests lie primarily in Roman historiography and ancient conceptions of memory, as well as the Homeric Hymns. Becca is excited to talk to anyone about Rutgers Classics.
Rick Hale is a current PhD student in the department of Classics at Rutgers University. He studied Film Theory as an undergraduate, and holds a BA in Communication Arts (Radio/TV/Film Focus) from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2012, he earned a Masters Degree in Library and Information Science from Rutgers. His current research interests include Orphism and Greek Religion, Classics in Cinema and popular culture, numismatics, and education & rhetoric in the Ancient world.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Lecturer
Sasha Barish began his MA in the Rutgers Classics Department in the fall of 2020 after receiving a BA in Classics and Linguistics at Harvard University. His academic interests include historical sociolinguistics, Roman comedy, and spoken Latin. He has written an undergraduate thesis about Latin insults and an Eidolon article about reading Ovid's Metamorphoses from a queer perspective, and he has given talks at conferences including CAAS.
Selena Ross joined the Classics department in 2016 after completing her BA in Classics at Ohio Wesleyan University. Selena has presented at the conference "Othering and the Other. Performing Identity in the Roman Empire," (2021) as well as the annual meeting of CAAS (2017 and 2018), and she acted as a panel respondent for the Rutgers' "Food and Drink in the Ancient World" conference (2019). She co-organized and presented at the Rutgers and Princeton co-hosted Zoom conference, "Specialized Labor in Classical Antiquity: Economy, Identity, Community" (2021). Here at Rutgers, Selena has taught elementary Latin, Roman Civilization, and Women in Antiquity. Her research interests focus on Roman social history, especially as relates to agriculture and rural craft. She is currently working on a dissertation on the lives and reputations of shepherds in Roman Italy.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics ( Ph.D., Yale )
Research interests: Serena Connolly teaches Roman history and Latin literature. Her research is characterized by her use of a wide range of texts from across the Roman world to understand Roman social history, including that of poorly-attested groups such as non-elites, women and slaves. She is the author of Lives Behind the Laws: The World of the Codex Hermogenianus, in which she explored Roman emperors' responses to the legal problems of their ordinary subjects, as well as a number of related articles. Her current book project is an introduction to the Distichs of Cato, collection of Roman wisdom and advice that was one of the most-read and best known ancient Latin texts for over 1000 years. Professor Connolly regularly teaches courses on Roman imperial history, Pompeii, ancient science and technology, and Latin literature.
Steven Brandwood came to Rutgers Classics in 2014 after undergraduate study at Yale and a few years of secondary school teaching in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. He has published articles and chapters on Herodotus, Aeschylus, and Catullus and was the Virginia Grace fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in 2018/19. Steve's dissertation project, Cult-Song and Religious Revival in Hellenistic Athens, considers the traditions of choral poetry associated with revived festival performance contexts in Athens, Delphi, and Delos in the late-Hellenistic period. His research interests include Greek poetry and performance, epigraphy, and religion.
Job Titles:
- Professor of Classics ( Ph.D., Harvard ) Research
Research Interests: Roman political history, social history of classical antiquity.
Job Titles:
- Distinguished Professor of Classics and Ancient History ( Ph.D., Pennsylvania )
Research Interests: Greek political history, social history of classical antiquity, Greek and Roman historiography.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics ( Ph.D., Harvard )
Victoria Hodges (she/her) joined the Rutgers Classics Department in Fall 2019 after earning her M.A. in Classics at San Francisco State University and her B.A. in Anthropology from Texas A&M University. She has participated in several archaeological projects as staff member including the VCP at Pompeii ('17-'19). She has also presented papers at CAAS ('20, '21), CAMWS ('20), CCC (now '22), and SCS ('21, '22) and is currently working on a chapter for an edited volume on material culture in the ancient novel. Her current research interests include gender, sexuality, and presentations of the body erotic in the ancient novel (SCS 22).