Graduate Students in Residence

George Baroud is a third-year student who graduated from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with a BA in Classics (2008), during which time he participated in the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (fall 2005) and wrote his thesis entitled "Callimachus and Catullus: Poetry of Poetics." George’s chief interests are Greek and Roman historiography and rhetoric (Thucydides and Tacitus in particular) and literary and political theory. Venturing further outside the canon, he is also interested in exploring the Classical Near East (especially the Levant), and the cultural exchanges between Classical and Arabic literature and thought. Email: gb993@nyu.edu

Susan Boland has been a part-time Ph.D. student for the last three years. She graduated summa cum laude from Colby College with a B.A. in Classics and received an M.A. in Classics from Harvard University. She has served on Colby’s Board of Overseers since 2003. After twenty years in the investment management industry, she returned to her roots. Her interests include Greek language and literature, especially archaic poetry and tragedy, the Greek historians, and imperial Latin literature. Email: susanboland@me.com

Maria Fernanda Crespo is a sixth-year student who came to NYU from the National University of Córdoba, Argentina, with a Licenciatura in Letras Clásicas. Fernanda's current scholarly interests include Latin literature of the Late Republic and Empire and classical political thought, and theories of empire. She has taught Intermediate Latin (Cicero), Classical Mythology, and served as a TA in MAP (NYU’s Great Books course, covering antiquity and the 19th century) and the Greek Thinkers. She delivered a paper entitled “Cesarismo en Latinoamérica” at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, at a Symposium celebrating the bicentennial of Latin-American independence, forthcoming in UNAM, 2010. She has published “La Máscara de Sócrates” in Nostromo (México, II, 2, 2009). Email: mfc271@nyu.edu

Daniel Hoyer is a third-year student who came to NYU with an MA from the University of British Columbia and a BA from the University of Toronto, both in Classics. His focus is on the agrarian economy of the Imperial Roman world, specifically relating to the production, distribution, and consumption of foodstuffs. He is also interested in comparative approaches, exploring these issues in other Imperial societies, both ancient and modern. He has published an article on this topic entitled “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Republican Agriculture in Central and Southern Italy” as part of the Conference Proceedings The Italians on the Land: Changing Perspectives Then and Now (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2009), and has another article forthcoming concerning the economic and political competition between Samnites and Romans in Italy during the 5th-3rd centuries BC. In spring 2011 he will be working as a Teaching Assistant for the archaeological field school at the late Roman site of Amheida in the Dakhleh Oasis, Egypt. Email: dch293@nyu.edu

Kyle P. Johnson is a seventh-year PhD student. He attended Boston College, Reed College (B.A., Classics, '02), and the University of California, Los Angeles. Kyle has published on sequential narrative in Homer in Comics and Classics (Oxford, 2010), Etruscan linguistics and medical practices (Etruscan News, 5 (2006), 1, 8.), and has written a review of Marina Heilmeyer's Ancient Herbs (BMCR 2007.09.63). Kyle is also a cofounder of Hephaistos Text  [hephaistos-text.org], an online host for free, open, and collaborative projects in classical philology. He is currently writing a dissertation, "Communicating Power in Caesar's Commentaries." Email: kpj204@nyu.edu 

Yekaterina (Katia) Kosova received her BA in Rhetoric and Philosophy from UC Berkeley. She is a 2nd-year PhD student working on the exact sciences in antiquity. She is interested in the origins of Greek astronomy, astrology and medicine and their material and conceptual relationships to Near Eastern predecessors. Email: entropiclogos@yahoo.com

Inger Kuin is a second-year PhD student from Leiden, The Netherlands. After completing a BA in Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam, she did an MA in Journalism and worked as a reporter and editor for a Dutch newspaper and for Dow Jones Newswires. She returned to academia to complete an MA in Philosophy, and studied at the New School for Social Research in New York. After a year as a Post-baccalaureate student in Classics at Columbia University, she came to NYU. Her main interests include ancient philosophy, ancient political thought, and Greek authors of the first and second century AD. She will be giving two papers at the 2010 Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy conference in New York in October: “Religion and Therapy in Epicurus,” and “Forgiveness and Punishment in Plutarch’s On the Delays of Divine Vengeance.” Email: nik212@nyu.edu

Michael Mascio is a ninth-year student who came to NYU from Johns Hopkins with a BA in Classics. He is writing his dissertation on “Horace and Philosophy.” His scholarly interests are Hellenistic philosophy and Latin poetry. He has taught Elementary Greek and Intermediate Latin (Cicero, Sallust, and Vergil), been a TA for Roman Republican History and MAP (NYU’s great books program), and in the summers taught Greek Tragedy, Mythology, Reading Latin for Graduate Students, and Ancient Greek History. He has given papers on "Horace and Cicero in Latin Literary History" at a joint colloquium of the University of North Carolina and Duke University (2004),  "The Creation of an Aesthetic Hierarchy" at a workshop given by NYU's Poetics & Theory Program (2004), “From Philosophy’s Place to Death’s Embrace: Reading Spaces in Horace’s Epicurean Odes,” at Johns Hopkins University (2005), and “Aristippus and Ulysses in Horace, Epistles 1” at the APA (2007), and gave a paper entitled “Horace Sermones 2.7 and Cicero’s Paradoxa Stoicorum” at the 2008 APA meeting in Chicago. Email: mcm300@nyu.edu  

 

Jay Mueller is a fouth-year student who came to NYU from Columbia with an MA in English. He received his BA from Eugene Lang College in philosophy and literary theory. His research interests include archaic Greek poetry and ancient literary theory, and he also studies the reception of classical literature. Email: jaymueller@nyu.edu

Abhijit Nagaraj is a first-year Ph.D. student with broad interests in classical literature, ranging from the Aesopic tradition to Silver Latin epic. He received his B.A. from Columbia in 2010, where he was awarded the Caverly prize in classics. Email: an1049@nyu.edu

 

Nathalie Sado Nisinson is a fifth-year graduate student currently working on a dissertation to be entitled “Greek Heroes, Roman Rituals: Cult and Culture Clash in Ovid's Heroides”. Her research interests include the works of Ovid, Augustan poetry in general, Augustan culture, Roman religion, and heroic mythology. She has served as a teaching assistant for classes on Roman history, classical mythology, and ancient epic. She acted as a preceptor for the NYU MAP program in the spring of 2009. She has taught intensive summer courses in classical mythology at NYU for two years. In November of 2009 she co-organized the NYU Graduate Student Conference ("Honey on the Cup: Didactic Poetry in the Ancient World") with Stephen Kidd.  In April 2008 she gave a paper entitled “Death or Glory: Hero-cult as a Model for Public Grief in Pindar's Eighth Isthmian Ode” at the Fourth Biennial Graduate Student Conference hosted by the Classics Department of Harvard University and titled “Working Through Trauma in the Ancient World.” Nathalie graduated from Vassar College in 2005 with a BA in Classical Studies. Email: ns1206@nyu.edu  

Kimberly Regler is a third-year graduate student who came to NYU after graduating from Colgate University in 2008 with a BA in Classics. As an undergraduate, she completed her honors thesis on the structural unity of Sophocles' Trachiniae, and was awarded the J. Curtiss Austin Latin Prize. She is interested in the treatment of rhetorical, literary, and philosophical trends in Greek and Latin poetry, particularly in Imperial Latin epic. Her other scholarly interests include the development of intellectual perception in early Greek philosophy and the oral treatises of the Hippocratic Corpus. Email: ksr253@nyu.edu

Calloway Scott is a 2nd-year graduate student. He completed his undergraduate degree in Greek and Latin at Kenyon College (2007) with a minor in Philosophy. After graduation he completed a post-baccalaureate at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Calloway’s research interests lie in popular morality, emotion, and religion in Greek Tragedy. He maintains a subsidiary interest in Lucretius’ handling of earlier literary and philosophic models in De Rerum Natura. Email: cbs338@nyu.edu

Amit Shilo is a fifth-year student who received his BA at NYU in Literature and History in 2000 and spent two years in the post-baccalaureate in Classics at Columbia University. His dissertation will analyze the Oresteia, Antigone, Alcestis, and Phaedo for their different creative relations to death. Two years ago he was at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he focused on death and burial in the material culture of archaic and classical Greece. His other interests are Seneca and the Hebrew Bible. He has taught Latin, Greek, Mythology, and Ancient Religion at NYU. Email: as220@nyu.edu  

 

Melanie Subacus is a fourth-year student who received her BA in 2007 from Saint Joseph's University in Latin. She attended the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome in the spring of 2006 and the summer session of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in 2010. She presented a paper entitled "Translation and Appropriation of Vergil’s Aeneid" at Bryn Mawr in December of 2009 and will be presenting a paper entitled “Et Incipiunt Fabulae: The Tradition of Translating Children’s Literature into Latin” at the fall 2010 meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States. She also has a collaborative translation of Propertius 2.33B in the Norton Pocket Book of Writing by Students (New York, 2010). Her interests include cosmopolitanism, Roman imperial literature, gender studies, and translation theory. Email: msubacus@gmail.com

Talia Varonos-Pavlopoulos is a first-year graduate student with a B.A. in Classics from Columbia University.  As an undergraduate, Talia was an active member of the Columbia/Barnard Drama Group and in 2009 she directed Euripides’ Medea under the supervision of Helene Foley. She wrote her senior thesis on the use of myth in Propertius 1.1, 1.3, and 1.15 with Mark Buchan. Her interests lie in Greek Drama, Augustan Poetry, gender, and literary theory. Email: tvp214@nyu.edu

 

Joel Ward is a seventh-year student with a BA from Hope College and an MA from Tulane University. His interests are Roman historiography, ancient prose, sociolinguistics, and numismatics. Last summer, he participated in the graduate seminar at the ANS. He is continuing the work begun there by writing a catalog of the Severan issues of the Peloponnesus. His dissertation, which he plans to finish this year, focuses on the instances and uses of viewing in the Severan narratives of Cassius Dio, Herodian and the HA. He has published a paper on Josephus and is currently revising one on Sallust’s Catiline for submission. He has delivered papers at CAMWS, the APA and the CA. He has taught various courses at Tulane, NYU, Fu Jen University (Taipei, Taiwan), and, as the graduate instructor, the ICCS (Rome). He is currently in residence at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, as a member of the Exzellenzcluster “Religion und Politik in den Kulturen der Vormoderne und Moderne.”
Email: jsw298@nyu.edu  

 

Brett Wisniewski is a seventh-year graduate student with a BA from Wayne State University in Detroit. He is currently writing a dissertation with the working title of "Spell-casting in Augustan Poetry: Magic and Discourses of Power." His interests include Latin literature, Religion, and Magic. He has received NYU's Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship for 2010-2011 and the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for 2007-2008. Email: blw239@nyu.edu  

Continuing Graduate Students (employed outside NYU)

Rebecka Lindau is leaving her position as the classics bibliographer at Princeton University to become the librarian at the American Academy in Rome. She entered the Ph.D. program in classics at NYU in the fall of 1998 with an MA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History from Stockholm  University. Her dissertation is on “Artemis and Virginity in Classical Antiquity.” Her interests include: Greek tragedy, archaic lyric poetry, and religion. She has taught Latin, Greek, Ancient Philosophy, and Classical Mythology at the International School of Languages in Los Angeles and at Continuing Education at Stockholm University. Among her awards is a Fulbright fellowship and among her publications are:  "A review of Gender and Politics in Greek Tragedy," LIBRES: An International Electronic Library Journal (2000) and "The Loeb Classical Library," Progressions 8.2 (1998). She is currently working on a source book on "Greek and Latin Authors: Editions, Translations, Commentaries, and Concordances" and on a database to locate the "Archives of Classical Scholars." She is the chair of the "Forum for Classics, Libraries, and Scholarly Communication" at the APA.
Email: rlindau@Princeton.edu  

 

Krista Sheerin is currently on maternity leave from the Garden City High School on Long Island. She came to NYU from Villanova University with a B.A. in Classics/Honors. She also holds an M.A. in Education from Hofstra University.  After earning her M.A. in Classics from NYU, she studied at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome.  She is currently in the final stages of writing her dissertation entitled "Tibullan Poetics: A Study in the Inevitability of Elegy."  Her other scholarly interests include Greek epic and Roman satire.  She held a teaching position at The Nightingale-Bamford School in Manhattan before moving to Garden City High School.  She has presented "An Analysis of the Herodotean LEGO" at CAAS and coached the student recitation of Horace’s Carmen saeculare along with Stephen Daitz at the New York Classical Club (2000), and has been, for several years, on the editorial staff of Classical World.
Email: ksheerin@optonline.net  

 

ALUMNI (past ten years)

 

Joel Christensen has a tenure-track job at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He graduated from NYU in 2007 with a dissertation on “The Failure of Speech: Rhetoric and Politics in the Iliad,” for which he was awarded NYU’s Lane Cooper Fellowship for 2006-07. He also received the Advanced Certificate in Poetics and Theory. He has co-authored “Flight Club: The New Archilochus Fragment and its Resonance with Homeric Epic” (MD 57, 2006: 19-43) with E. T. E. Barker of Christ Church, Oxford. Forthcoming two articles: “Universality or Priority? The Rhetoric of Death in the Gilgamesh Poems and the Iliad” in a special issue of Quaderni del Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità e del Vicino Oriente dell’Università Ca' Foscari, E. Cingano and L. Milano (eds.), and “La ékfrasis homérica y la copa de Néstor,” Fernando Pérez (trans.), in Vértebra (Chile).
Email: jpc274@nyu.edu  

 

Panayotes Dakouras is teaching at the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York City. He graduated from NYU in 2006 with a dissertation on “Maecenas eques: A Study in the Creation and Development of an Image.”
Email: pdakouras@nightingale.org  

 

Valentina DeNardis is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies and Director of Undergraduate Classical Studies at Villanova University. In 2009-2010 she served as President of the Pennsylvania Classical Association and organized the PCA 2010 Annual Institute (www.villanova.edu/pca). She is an alumna of the Latin/Greek Institute and taught there for several summers, and also taught at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome in 2000-2001. As an undergraduate at Colgate University, she spent a semester studying classics in Venice, Italy, and as a graduate student she studied at the summer sessions of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (1998). She graduated from NYU in 2003 with a dissertation on “Ratio omnia vincit: Cosmological, Political, and Poetic Power in the Astronomica of Manilius.” Her interests include: Greek and Latin poetry (especially didactic), Greek and Roman material culture, ancient astronomy and astrology, gender studies, and the legacy of the classical world.
Email: valentina.denardis@villanova.edu  

 

William Herbst teaches at the Bay Shore High School. He graduated from NYU in 2003 with a dissertation on “Fragmented Faces: Nose, Ear, and Eye Imagery in Roman Satire.”
Email: wherbst@bayshore.k12.ny.us  

 

Mary Knight is a free-lance science and medical writer who has written for the American Museum of Natural History and Natural History magazine. She graduated from NYU in 1998 with a dissertation on “A Geographic, Archaeological, and Scientific Commentary on Strabon’s Egypt (Geographica, Book 17, sections 1-2).”
Email: available upon request from nas1@nyu.edu  

Danielle La Londe is a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Classics at Haverford College. She graduated from NYU in 2010 with a dissertation entitled “The Spectacle of Treaty-Making in Latin Poetry.” She also received the Advanced Certificate in Poetics and Theory. Email: dlalonde@haverford.edu

 

Matthew McGowan has a tenure-track job at Fordham. He graduated from NYU in 2002 with a dissertation on “Religion, Law, and Politics in Ovid Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto.”
Email: mmcgowan@wooster.edu  

 

Sean Redmond is the Senior Systems Administrator of the Exhibitions Department for the Museum of Natural History, NYC. He graduated from NYU in 1998 with a dissertation on “Ovid’s Semiotic Invention in the Metamorphoses.”
Email: sean@jiffycomp.com  

 

Benjamin Sammons graduated in 2007 with a dissertation entitled "Homeric Catalogue: Tradition, Paradigm and the Limits of Narrativity." He has recently published a revised form of his dissertation with Oxford University Press, under the new title The Art and Rhetoric of the Homeric Catalogue (2010). He has published articles on Homer and early Greek epic in the Classical Journal, the Classical Bulletin, and Greek, Roman & Byzantine Studies, and has presented numerous papers on epic and tragedy at meetings of the APA and CAMWS. Since his graduation Ben has held teaching positions at Penn State University, NYU (Liberal Studies Program), Montclair State University, and Queens College (CUNY). Email: benjamin.sammons@gmail.com

 

Osman Umurhan graduated in 2008 with a dissertation on "Representations of space and the satirist in Juvenal's Satires". He is currently a visiting assistant professor at Rutgers University, New Jersey. Email: umurhan@rci.rutgers.edu

Stelios Vasilakis runs Greekworks.com. He graduated from NYU in 1998 with a dissertation on “Dinner and Symposium as Narrative Devices in Classical Greek and Latin Literature.”
Email: can be contacted through Greekworks.com.