Graduate Alumni

Having completed her PhD in 2016, Carrie is an Assistant Professor of Historical Studies and Classics at the University of Toronto. Carrie’s research focuses on questions of materiality, agency, and identity within maritime networks in the ancient Mediterranean. Her recent book project uses shipwreck assemblages to address economic integration, cultural exchange, and transnational networks in the Roman World. She has participated in underwater fieldwork in Florida, Cyprus, and Turkey, and has co-directed the excavation of a ship in Manhattan, New York. Her current survey off the south-central coast of Cyprus focuses on the development of digital technologies for recording and analyzing maritime material culture.

Carrie Atkins Website

Erica is currently an Assistant Professor of Latin literature at at Durham University (England), having earned her PhD from Cornell in 2013. Her research focuses on Roman drama and literature of the Neronian period. She has published articles and book chapters on Senecan tragedy, Lucan’s Pharsalia, Plautus, Terence, and ancient Roman performance culture. Her first book, Seneca's Characters: Fictional Identities and Implied Human Selves, examines through the lens of Senecan tragedy fictional characters' vexed status as textually circumscribed entities on the one hand, and human analogues on the other.

Erica Bexley Website

Natasha (PhD 2018) is currently Classics Fellow at Marlboro College, VT. She received her Hon. B.A. with a double major in Classical Civilization and Latin from the University of Toronto in 2004. After teaching Latin and history courses at the secondary level for six years, she returned to the University of Toronto and obtained her M.A. in Classics in 2011. That year also marks the beginning of her studies at Cornell in the area of Classical Literature and Philology. Her dissertation examines Vergil's portrayal of Venus and Juno in the Aeneid as a response to the figuring of Aphrodite and Eros in the antecedent literary Greek tradition.

Allison Boex came to Cornell with a B.A. from Kenyon College (2003) and completed her Ph.D. in 2014 with the dissertation "Hic tacitus lapis: voice, audience, and space in early Latin verse-epitaphs." She is currently teaching Latin locally and doing freelance work for, among others, L'Année philologique, Brill, and Cornell University Press, and working on submitting her dissertation for publication.

Liana Brent (PhD 2019) completed her BA and MA at McMaster University before coming to Cornell to study classical archaeology. Her dissertation, "Corporeal Connections: Tomb Disturbance, Reuse and Violation in Roman Italy," explored interactions between the living and the dead in Roman cemeteries. While finishing her PhD, Liana held a two-year Rome Prize fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, and soon after, a Mellon Post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2020-2023, Liana taught at Kenyon College in Ohio, and she is now an Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College in Maine.

Liana Brent website

Micaela received her PhD in 2018. After a B.A. summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis in 2011, with a double major in Archaeology and Classics, she joined the Classics PhD program at Cornell University, concentrating in classical archaeology. Her dissertation analyzed cooking and eating in Minoan houses and palaces. She is now working at Cornell Libraries and pursuing an MS in Information and Library Science, with plans to continue a career in academic libraries.

Michael Esposito received his PhD in 2018 and now teaches Latin at Collegiate School in New York City. After a BA at Fordham University and a year teaching Latin in a New York City high school, he joined the Cornell Classics Department. He wrote a dissertation on persuasion in the Aeneid. 

After obtaining an MA in Classical Literature and Philology from Cornell in 2014, Megan moved back to Chicago. In 2017, she earned an MA in Applied Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Later that year, she began working as an adjunct lecturer at UIC, where she taught Latin for the Department of Classics and Mediterranean Studies and various English language courses for UIC's Tutorium in Intensive English. In 2019, she moved into a full-time lecturer position in the Graduate College's International Teaching Assistant Program, where she helps non-native English-speaking TAs improve their English pronunciation and classroom communication skills. Despite Megan's career trajectory, Latin literature continues to hold a special place in her heart.

Theo is Assistant Professor at Franciscan University of Steubenville, OH. He received his BA summa cum laude in 2011 from Hillsdale College, majoring in Latin with honors and minoring in Greek. His focus from late undergraduate years on has been the philosophy of Augustine, though he also works on Plato and Neo-Platonism as well as Homer and Vergil. He maintains a strong interest in teaching classical languages and literature, having taught Latin, Greek, and Philosophy also at the secondary level. He completed a dissertation on Augustine’s principles of Scriptural interpretation.

Katie came to Cornell with a BA in Anthropology from the University of South Carolina Honors College (2010). After completing her PhD in the classical archaeology track in 2017, Katie joined the Honors College at Purdue University as a Clinical Assistant Professor. She teaches interdisciplinary courses on materiality and human-environment interaction, and she is also the faculty preceptor of Silver House in the Honors Residential Community.  Katie's research uses digital modeling to explore how people in the Bronze Age Aegean moved throughout their land- and seascapes and created communities based on a shared sense of place.

Katie (PhD 2015) was a Mellon postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University in 2016 before coming to the University of Chicago, where she presently teaches in the Department of Classics. Her research and publications focus on environmental history, landscape practices, and concepts of space and place in the ancient Mediterranean during the dynamic first millennium BCE, appearing in venues such as the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, Antiquity, History Compass, and forthcoming in TAPA. She currently directs fieldwork on rural settlements on Cyprus, and is co-editing a volume on Cypriot archaeology in addition to a book project on social and environmental change during the Archaic period.

Catherine (Katie) Kearns Webpage

Erik completed the Ancient Philosophy program in 2012 with research on the dialogue genre, philosophy of education and skepticism. From 2012 to 2020, he held various roles at Rollins College, where he became involved in curriculum design and the Philosophy for Kids (P4K) movement. In 2020, he took a new position at Friends Academy, a K-8 school in Dartmouth, MA, where he is teaching Latin and helping integrate philosophy into the humanities curriculum. Erik is author of Augustine and the Dialogue (Cambridge University Press, 2018) and co-author of Ethics for the Very Young: A Philosophy Curriculum for Early Childhood Education (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019). His current book project, Philosophy at the Gym, explores the intersection of athletics and ethics in antiquity.

After completing his PhD in the Spring of 2023 Andrew Merritt has taken up a position as an Assistant Teaching Professor at Georgetown University where he primarily teaches introductory and intermediate Greek and Latin – a role for which he was well prepared by pursuit of the Greek and Latin linguistics track under the guidance of Professor Alan Nussbaum, who supervised his thesis on the etymology of the Greek adjective καλός ‘beautiful’. Andrew is currently engaged with teaching and research in Greek and Indo-European linguistics, with particular attention paid to the conceptual relationships underlying word-formation and etymology in Greek and its relatives. Andrew is an immensely grateful lover of Cornell Classics and an enduringly avid participant in the circle of historical linguists affiliated with Cornell.

After completing his PhD in 2017, Jake Nabel worked at the Getty Research Institute and UCLA before arriving at Pennsylvania State University, where he is currently an Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Jake is a historian of ancient Rome, pre-Islamic Iran, and the points of contact between the two. He has published on Roman-Parthian relations, the reception of Alexander the Great in Persian literature, early imperial Latin poetry, and the Hellenistic east. He is also PI at parthiansources.com, a digital collection of Parthian texts that he began as a Summer Graduate Fellow in Digital Humanities at Cornell’s Olin Library.

Peter received his BA in Classical Studies and Economics from Dartmouth College in 2012. After a post-baccalaureate year at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the department in 2014. He wrote his dissertation on philosophical testimony in Cicero's dialogues, and has published work on Cicero's philosophy, ancient ethics, ancient scepticism, and early modern reception. This fall he will be a Loeb postdoctoral fellow at the University of Toronto and will begin a new research project on epistolary methods in ancient philosophy.

Aaron graduated in 2012 with the PhD in Classical Literature and Philology. After working at the University of California Santa Barbara and at Lake Highland Preparatory School, he moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2014, where he is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology. In 2014 he also published his revised dissertation as The Space That Remains: Reading Latin Poetry in Late Antiquity (Cornell University Press). While his primary research interest is late antique Latin poetry, he also works on the reception of classical literature; on bilingual manuscripts and translation; on commentaries and paratexts; and, in general, on the many ways that classical literature invites and evades closure.

Aaron Pelttari Website

After completing his PhD at Cornell in 2011, Matthew taught for two years at Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Since 2013, he has been a member of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, where he is now an Associate Professor. His first book, Athens, Thrace, and the Shaping of Athenian Leadership, and based on his Cornell dissertation research, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2013. Recently he published two more books, Understanding Greek Warfare (Routledge 2019) and Battles and Battlefields of Ancient Greece: A Guide to their History, Topography, and Archaeology (co-author with C. Jacob Butera, Pen & Sword 2019). Currently he is working on a book about Spartan militarism and commemoration of the war-dead.

Matthew A. Sears Website

Tobias Torgerson graduated in 2011 with a Ph.D. in Classical Literature and Philology. His research focused on epic poetry, mythology, wordplay, and allusion. After graduating, he worked as a freelance writer for Examiner.com, where he specialized in the historical sites of Milwaukee, WI. Since August of 2012, he has been a feature writer for Epic, an electronic health records company based in Verona, WI. When he isn't documenting laboratory software for Epic, Tobias is working on a historical novel about the Black Hawk War.

After graduating in 2016 with a dissertation on metapoetry in Terence, Goran Vidović returned to his undergraduate institution, University of Belgrade, Serbia, as a member of the Latin division at the Department of Classics, where he currently teaches graduate prose composition and a third-year Latin course in Plautus. His main research interests are Latin literature and drama, both Greek and Roman.  He has published a Serbian translation with introduction and commentary of the anonymous late antique comedy, the Querolus, and he is planning on revising his dissertation for publication. Meanwhile, his most recent and forthcoming publications include articles on various topics, such as: lexical ambiguities in Livy; problems of staging female affection in Roman comedy; paratragedy in Aristophanes; and bodily liquids symbolism in Aeschylus. 

Goran Vidovic Webpage

Jon received his B.A. in classics and history from The George Washington University in 2012 and his M.A. in classical languages from the University of Georgia in 2014. In January of 2020, he defended his dissertation in which he reappraises late antique militarization by examining the martial language of bishops and bureaucrats. This fall, he will begin teaching high school and middle school Latin in New Jersey.

Ye was the inaugural Bridge MA Fellow at Cornell (2021-2022). His primary research interests include slavery, manumission, and citizenship as well as other questions concerning freedom in the ancient world. In his thesis “Constructing Harmony: Manumission Narratives in Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus” he argues that manumission narratives allowed the historians to construct a past that aligned with the present and future, which in turn helped to mediate the contradiction between the Romans’ respect for the institution of manumission and their anxiety over its consequence, that is, the integration of former slaves into the citizen body. After completing the Bridge MA Program in the summer of 2022, Ye joined the Classics PhD Program at Princeton University, where he continues to explore his research interests at the intersection between history and literature.

Ye Zhou, Princeton Classics

Ioannis Ziogas (Cornell PhD, 2010) is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University (England). His first book (Ovid and Hesiod: The Metamorphosis of the Catalogue of Women, Cambridge 2013) is a revised version of his Cornell dissertation. He has also co-edited (with M. Skempis)Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configurations of Space in Greek and Roman Epic (de Gruyter 2014). Ioannis’ main research interests focus on Augustan poetry, but he has published on a variety of subjects, ranging from Homer and Hesiod to David Malouf and Salman Rushdie.

Ioannis Ziogas Website