CLASSICS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Instructor
- Visiting Instructor
Combining a background in classics with modern history allows Barbara Melton to pursue her passion for classical receptions while teaching Latin language and literature as well as history courses. Prior to completing her PhD at the University of Salzburg (Austria) she received a Diploma in American Studies as a Fulbright student at Smith College (Northampton, Massachusetts). She taught at St. Mary's College of Maryland and the University of Minnesota before arriving in Atlanta and has been teaching at Emory since 2002.
Her research interests and student mentoring focus on classical receptions in a wide range of contexts including late antiquity, early modern Europe, and especially British North America up to the present. She has published an edition of Andrew White's Voyage to Maryland (1633): Relatio Itineris in Marilandiam (1995) and studies on seventeenth-century monastic life and historiography. Her recent work has appeared in Classics in the Modern World: A ‘ Democratic Turn'? ed. L. Hardwick and S.J. Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), Europäische Geschichtswelten (European Cultures of History), ed. Thomas Wallnig (Berlin, Munich: De Gruyter, 2012), and Enduring Loss in Early Modern Germany, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2010). ;Classical Receptions Journal 7/1, a special issue on The Legacy of the Roman Senate, includes her essay "Constructing Roman Senators in Imperial Germany" (2015).
Keeping abreast of current receptions she writes theater and music reviews of productions at the summer festival in Salzburg, Austria. Tips on classical receptions in contemporary America are always welcome!
Job Titles:
- Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Art History
Job Titles:
- Bracht Branham Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature
- Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Celia Campbell Assistant Professor
Biography
Celia works broadly across the Latin verse tradition, but with particular attention to the poetry of the late Republic and early Empire. She completed a DPhil at Trinity College, Oxford and served as the Interim Head of Classics at St Anne's College, Oxford before finding her way back to the States, where she has taught at NYU, Fordham, UVa, and FSU. A native of coastal Maine, her time in Virginia and Florida has accustomed her to Southern climes, but she still can't quite seem to get used to being called ma'am. Celia is currently at work on a book on Ovid's Metamorphoses, but often engages in the virtuous procrastination of thinking about Senecan tragedy and Virgilian pseudepigrapha.
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Classics and Comparative Literature
David van Schoor was born, raised, and educated at Cape Town, in the Republic of South Africa. He majored in ancient Greek, and Latin at the University of Cape Town. After completing his BA in 2001, he travelled to Tokyo where he lived and worked as a high school teacher for three years. Returning to South Africa he took up posts teaching Classics in Cape Town and at Rhodes University in Makhanda (Grahamstown) and completed his MA in Latin poetry in 2008. On being awarded a Swiss Federal Scholarship in 2013, he pursued his PhD in Greek drama at the University of Zürich, under Prof. Christoph Riedweg. From 2018-2022 David was senior lecturer in Classics at Rhodes University. From 2022-2023 he was a residential fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, DC and joins Emory as Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek in June 2023
Job Titles:
- Associate Teaching Professor
- Emily Master Associate Teaching Professor
Biography
Emily Master earned her BA in Classics and History (Highest Distinction) from the University of Virginia and her MA and PhD from Princeton University. She is a Roman historian, with a particular focus on the intersection of law and politics during the late Republic and early Principate. Emily has taught a wide range of courses, including Latin at all levels, literature in translation, history, and Roman law. She is currently at work on a monograph on the development of law during the Augustan principate.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics and Art History
- Eric Varner Associate Professor of Classics and Art History
Job Titles:
- Assistant Teaching Professor, Italian
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Classic
Job Titles:
- Academic Department Administrator
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Jonathan Master Associate Professor
Biography
Jonathan Master grew up in Wenonah, New Jersey and had the good fortune of having a nationally recognized Latin teacher in high school. He earned his BA in Classics and History at Columbia University in 2001, and then his PhD at Princeton in 2008. He joined the Emory faculty in 2007. He has taught a range of courses in Latin from beginning to advanced and a number of courses in translation. His research focuses on imperial Latin prose, especially historiography, and most recently Seneca's views on historiography. His book Provincial Soldiers and Imperial Instability in the Histories of Tacitus is forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press. In it Master argues that Tacitus uses the civil wars of AD 69 to identify provincial subjects of the Roman Empire who serve in the military as a driving force of empire-wide instability.
Job Titles:
- Associate Teaching Professor
- Katrina Dickson Associate Teaching Professor
Job Titles:
- Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Interdisciplinary Humanities
Job Titles:
- Academic Degree Program Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Louise Pratt Professor
- Professor
Biography
After receiving a B.A. in Classics and History of Ideas from Williams College and a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan, Louise Pratt taught for a year at Bowdoin College as a visiting assistant professor before coming to Emory in 1989. She has served several times as department chair, in 1995-96, 2005-2009 and 2013-2016, and has won several teaching awards including the Classical Association of the Midwest and South's Award for Excellence in College Teaching in 2003, the Emory College Language Center Award for Excellence in Language Teaching in 2010, and the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012.
Her teaching and research interests include Homer, Greek tragedy, and Plato. Her first book, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics (Michigan, 1997), examines the way archaic Greek poetry plays with the fictional and seductive qualities of literature by connecting it to liars and tricksters. Her most recent major publication is a Festschrift in honor of Professor Ruth Scodel, co-edited with C. Michael Sampson, Engaging Classical Texts in the Contemporary World: From Narratology to Reception (Michigan, 2018). She is currently working on a book on representations of children in Greek literature. Her articles on children and childhood have appeared in Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy, Hesperia suppl. 41 (2007), Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Engaging Classical Texts in the Contemporary World (Michigan, 2018).
She has also published two textbooks, The Essentials of Greek Grammar: A Reference for Intermediate Readers of Ancient Greek and Eros at the Banquet: Reviewing Greek with Plato's Symposium (Oklahoma, 2010, 2011) and is working on a third on Aeschylus' Agamemnon. She has taught all levels of Classics, Greek, and Latin courses at Emory from freshman seminars on
Job Titles:
- Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek
Determining that acting was too hard a way to make a living, Niall W. Slater opted for the leisure of the theoried class. After receiving a B.A. from The College of Wooster and a Ph.D. from Princeton, he taught at Concordia College (Moorhead, Minnesota) and the University of Southern California before arriving at Emory. He served as chairman of the department 1991-1994, then later as director of Emory's Center for Language, Literature, and Culture. He received the Emory Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching at Emory in 1999 and was named the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek in 2004.
His research interests include the ancient theater and its archaeology, the ancient novel, gender studies, and recently warfare and its cultural impacts. His books include Euripides: Alcestis (in the Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy series); Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Reading Petronius (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton University Press, 1985). His translations of various Middle and New Comedy poets are included in The Birth of Comedy: Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions, 486-280, edited by Jeffrey Rusten (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). He is a past president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South as well as past president of the national Phi Beta Kappa Society.
Job Titles:
- Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor Emeritus
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor
- Chairman
- Sandra Blakely Chair and Associate Professor
Biography
Anthropology, history, religion, fragmentary sources and secret rites are central to Dr. Blakely's research. She completed a PhD in Classics and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, exploring the Greek metallurgical daimones in light of comparative models for the sacralization of metallurgical production from Tanzania and the Bakongo.
She has worked extensively on the most fragmentary sources from the Greek and Roman historians, publishing commentaries on the Augustan mythographer Conon, the late Republican Ethnographer Alexander Polyhistor, and Herodorus of Herakleia, a local historian from a Greek colony on the Black Sea.
Her current research brings Social Network Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to the epigraphic record of the Great Gods of Samothrace, to test the hypothesis that the safety at sea the Samothracian rites promised was asocial reality as well as a mythic metaphor.