Research Across the Department
The Classics faculty engages in research across many areas of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The cultures and literatures of the Roman empire are especially well represented; our faculty includes experts in areas such as education, literary reception, medicine, music and performance, material culture, religion, and economics. We are also proud of our work on other rich topics ranging from early Greece to Classical reception and pedagogy, areas in which we also support student research. Collaboration with students also enriches faculty research: undergraduate and graduate assistants participate in numerous ongoing projects.
Recent Faculty Research
Nicola Aravecchia’s latest book project explores early Christianity in Egypt and focuses on a fourth-century church that he and his team excavated at the site of Amheida (ancient Trimithis), in Egypt’s Western Desert.
Elena Baldi, our Postdoctoral Fellow in numismatics, is hard at work building the catalogue and database of the university’s John Max Wulfing Collection of Ancient Coins and Related Objects.
William Bubelis has been collaborating with Dr. Baldi on the Wulfing catalogue and database. His recent publications and projects have ranged from Greek numismatics and economics to Athenian legal and religious institutions to politics in Greek oratory.
Ian Hollenbaugh is developing a monograph on the Indo-European verb, as well as digital corpora of texts that he has tagged in his research on the uses of various tenses in context.
Lance Jenott studies both New Testament apocrypha and Egyptian monastic literature that reveals facets of ancient Egyptian Christianity beyond the confines of Scripture and orthodox doctrines. He is currently writing a commentary on the Gospel of Judas for the Hermeneia series. He recently published a translation of the Coptic Investiture of the Archangel Gabriel, as well as an edition, translation, and literary-historical analysis of The Book of the Foreigner from Codex Tchacos in the Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists.
Cathy Keane is writing a commentary on Juvenal’s fifth book of Satires (poems 13-16). She is also engaged in an ongoing exploration of the poetics of Roman satire and related genres, including intertextuality between the Epigrams of Martial and the Satires of Juvenal.
In 2021 Tom Keeline published a commentary on Cicero’s speech Pro Milone. Other recent publications have ranged from the first century BC (“Were Cicero’s Philippics the Cause of his Death?”) through the nineteenth century AD (“Are You Smarter than a Sixth-Former? Verse Composition and Linguistic Proficiency in Victorian Classical Exams”), with stops along the way in the first century AD (word order in Pliny the Younger), late(r) antiquity (the Latin Anthology; Terentianus Maurus), and the early modern period (Count Zinzendorf and Moravian Latin; Isaac Casaubon). He is now preparing a digital edition of Ovid’s Ibis and working on pedagogical topics both ancient (Asconius; Latin grammarians) and modern (learning and teaching Latin vocabulary). Tom is committed to exploring the richness of Latin and the classical tradition from antiquity to the present; for example, he co-organized a panel at the 2022 CAMWS annual meeting on the use of Latin by about about indigenous Americans.
Tim Moore researches and publishes on topics of ancient music, theater, and meter, and is working on a major digital project housed in the Humanities Digital Workshop: a database of meters in Greek drama.
Luis Salas has published a book on Galen’s anatomical experiments, and has been working on shorter projects concerned with Galen’s anatomy, physiology, definitions of disease, and approach to psychological disease.
Rebecca Sears is writing a textbook on ancient Greek and Roman music. She also researches Ovid’s poetry and its reception.
Zoe Stamatopoulou is writing a commentary and translation on Plutarch’s dialogue Symposium of the Seven Sages. She also continues to research and publish on the poetry of Hesiod and other Greek authors of the Archaic and Classical periods.
Kate Wilson’s research in the field of Hellenistic didactic and scientific poetry and poetics is represented in numerous short publications and a book in progress. She has also been exploring topics in Classical pedagogy and race, on the topic of which she organized a special exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum and a new course.