Search | Department of Classics

Benjamin Anderson

Please note that I am not seeking to admit any new PhD advisees for matriculation in fall '25.

Annetta Alexandridis studies the art and archaeology of ancient Greece and Rome with a particular interest in gender studies, animal studies, and the media of archaeology. Her first book researched how the women of the Roman Imperial families from Livia to Julia Domna (late 1st century BCE to early 3rd century CE) were represented in public (Die Frauen des römischen Kaiserhauses. Eine Untersuchung ihrer bildlichen Darstellung von Livia bis Iulia Domna; von Zabern, 2004). It argues that their imagery as promoted in statues, coins, inscriptions, honorary titles, and funerary orations helped establish the political and public role of these women – a function the political system itself (a monarchy staged as a republic) did not provide.

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Frederick M Ahl

Professor of Classics; Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow. Epic Poetry; Tragic Theatre; Wordplay in Literature; Theory of Translation.Books: Lucan: An Introduction; Seneca: Three Tragedies; Metaformations: Soundplay and Wordplay in Ovid and Other Classical Poets; Sophocles' Oedipus: Evidence and Self-Conviction; Statius' Thebaid: A Reconsideration; The Odyssey Re-formed; articles on Greek music, Homeric narrative, ancient rhetoric, and Roman imperial poetry.

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'I had to complete my junior year in China because of the pandemic'

Jingkai Liu is a Classics and Government major.

'I learned to open my work up to public criticism'

Catalina Peñéñory is a classics and Italian major.

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Arts and Sciences faculty honored for teaching, advising excellence

"These faculty members and graduate teaching assistants have made tremendous contributions for the benefit of our students, guiding their educational paths and molding their experiences."

Researchers link ancient wooden structure to water ritual

Cornell researchers used dendrochronology and a form of radiocarbon dating to identify the ancient origins of the structure in Northern Italy.

Stephen Sansom concludes his time at Cornell with “MUSE-AK” performance

Stephen Sansom, a Postdoctoral Associate in Classics, took the stage with his bandmates on May 5 for “MUSE–AK: a Mall Performance of Ancient Greek Song.” This wonderful contribution to the Sculpture Shoppe exhibition made a fitting conclusion for Stephen's time at Cornell. He will begin his new position as an Assistant Professor of Classics at Florida State University this upcoming fall.

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Medusa is a nonbinary ‘revenge-pop’ musician

The Sculpture Shoppe will be open Sunday, May 29 from noon until 8:00 PM, with the performance by Medusa starting at 6:00 PM. All are welcome!

Medusa is a nonbinary ‘revenge-pop’ musician based in Buffalo, New York. Their signature production - described by Soundriv as “a breakthrough collection of LGBTQ hymns,” and by Bucketlist as “the most inventive [expletive] music we’ve heard in a long time” - often features unconventional sounds like wolf howls and cheerleading chants. Medusa describes their style as “by any means necessary,” then makes good on the promise.

The Sculpture Shoppe at Ithaca Mall is an exhibition of plaster reproductions of classical Greco-Roman art from the Cornell Cast Collection and responses to cast culture and classical art by contemporary artists and thinkers. The exhibition will take place from May 5-29, 2022, in a former retail space at the Ithaca Mall (next to the Food Court). By bringing classical art and contemporary responses into an unexpected context through the venue of the near-abandoned shopping mall, we hope to draw the public into conversations about the history, problematics, and mutability of the “western canon”.

Opening times are Wednesdays and Thursdays 4:00-8:00 PM and Saturday and Sunday 12:00-5:00 PM, starting May 5 until the end of the month.

Artists featured:

Katherine Akey, Daniel G. Andújar and Richard Fletcher (Minus Plato), Sherwin Banfield, Laurie Berenhaus, WonJung Choi, Jeanne Ciravolo, Dan Daly, Benjamin Entner, Pablo Garcia-Lopez, Gemelxs VS, William E. Jones, Athena Kirk, Angaelica LaPasta, Gracelee Lawrence, Rebecca Levitan and Danny Smith, Virginia Maksymowicz, Leeza Meksin, Muse AK (Rusty Keeler, Stephen Sansom, Norm Scott, and David Fifield), Sofia Moreno and David Nasca, Joshua Reiman, Marina Resende Santos, Kaitlin Santoro, Ciaran Short, Jeffrey Slomba, Kyle Staver, Rhonda Weppler, and Christina West.

120 Goldwin Smith Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853
United States

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Classics active learning course explores differences in ways of writing

A classics course provided students with a hands-on understanding of the processes behind writing and writing systems in all parts of the world

An African man's head with a ray-like collar above the face of a roaring lion with other artwork from the Sculpture Shoppe exhibition in the background.

Contemporary and ancient art exhibit enlivens Ithaca Mall

The “Sculpture Shoppe” exhibition displays selections from Cornell’s plaster cast collection of Greco-Roman sculptures alongside – and sometimes within – contemporary artists’ responses to cast culture and classical art.

Fall 2022 Highlighted Courses

Classes of interest for first-year students.

Latin and Greek Mottos for Cornell’s Earth Source Heat project

Cornell’s Earth Source Heat borehole project already had a fitting English motto: “Onward and Downward.” Now, the project has Latin and Greek mottos courtesy of Prof. Daniel Gallagher: Energeia Geothermica: Perge deorsum!

Olivia Graves

Olivia Graves is a PhD candidate concentrating on the archaeology of the Roman economy. Before starting at Cornell in Fall 2020, Olivia earned a B.A. in English and Classics from UC Berkeley, an MPhil in Archaeology from the University of Oxford, and a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Classics from UCLA. Olivia’s research mobilizes archaeological coin finds towards questions pertaining to the socioeconomic and monetary history of the Roman world. Her dissertation examines coin finds recovered from archaeological sites in Roman Italy to explore the relationship(s) between political and economic change on the macro-scale and changing patterns of coin use on the micro-scale. Olivia has conducted archaeological fieldwork at the Mycenaean cemetery of Aidonia in Greece, the Roman small town of Dorchester-on-Thames in the UK, and most recently the Roman rural minor center of Marzuolo in Tuscany. In Spring 2023, she also curated coins for the exhibition, “Wonder and Wakefulness: The Nature of Pliny the Elder,” held at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

/olivia-graves

Claire Challancin

Claire Challancin received her BAsumma cum laudewith a double major in Classical Languages and Anthropology (Archaeology concentration) from Saint Mary’s College of California in 2019. She is a PhD candidate specializing in Mediterranean archaeology. Claire is interested in the sociocultural dynamics in Sicily in the Hellenistic-Republican period. Her dissertation focuses on epitymbia, monumental funerary structures commonly found in Hellenistic necropolises throughout the island, and what they reveal about the communities living on the island, connectivity, as well as cultural change and continuity. Claire has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Tuscany at the Santa Marta site with the University of Siena, and Baratti and Venturina Terme with the Soprintendenza of Pisa and Livorno. More recently, she has worked in Sicily at the Temple of Apollo at Halaesa with the University of Messina and Oxford University, and the agora of Morgantina with the Contrada Agnese Project and Agora Valley Project.

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Liam McDonald

Liam'sresearch at Cornell will focus on dendrochronology and the radiocarbon calibration process. His other research interests include paleoenvironmental reconstruction, human-environment interaction, scientific approaches to the archaeological record and Roman social and cultural history.

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Ruth Portes

Ruth is a Ph.D. Candidate specializing in the ancient Black Sea Region. She received her B.A. in Archaeology and Writing from Johns Hopkins University (2016), and her M.A. in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies from Brandeis University (2018). She has excavated in Spain, Israel, Mongolia, and Georgia. Her dissertation examines how the convergence of Greek colonization and Achaemenid hegemony during the mid-first millennium BCE transformed the social production of landscape in modern-day Georgia. She is a co-founder of the CIAMS Anti-colonialism and Anti-racism (ARCO) Interest Group as well as of the Coffee Hour for Classicists of Color. She joined the Classical Archaeology program in 2019.

/ruth-portes

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Tear down academic silos: Take an ‘undisciplinary’ approach

A new Cornell study suggests that solving societal problems such as climate change could require dismantling rigid academic boundaries, so that researchers from varying disciplines could work together collaboratively.

Oil painting of a person in robes at a desk, holding a flaming heart

Klarman Fellow traces ideas of slavery from ancient Rome to upstate NY

Toni Alimi’s book project, “Slaves of God,” delves deep into the Augustine cannon, explaining the philosopher’s reasons for justifying slavery.

Athena Kirk explores ancient Greek lists in new book

Athena Kirk's new book, “Ancient Greek Lists: Catalogue and Inventory Across Genres,” argues that the list form was the ancient mode of expressing value through text, examining the ways in which lists can “stand in for objects, create value, act as methods of control, and approximate the infinite.”

Cat Lambert

I work widely on Latin and Greek literature through the lenses of book history, gender and sexuality studies, queer studies, and the intersections between these critical approaches.

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NATO decision on Finland, Sweden strong on paper, future unclear

With NATO formally inviting Finland and Sweden to join its alliance after Turkey dropped its objections, classics and history professor Barry Strauss comments that history is full of alliances that amounted to little.

Translation updates Cicero’s treatise on jokes as ‘weapons’

Michael Fontaine’s lively new translation amuses as well as instructs.

Alan van den Arend

I am a classicist and historian who studies receptions of antiquity in late medieval and early modern Europe, especially Italy. My current project considers the importance of perceptions and emotions for understanding antiquity's socio-cultural significance in Italy's long fifteenth century (c. 1350-1550). Using methods from across the humanities and social sciences, my work engages aesthetics, philology, archaeology, gender, and book history to argue for feeling's fraught but foundational role in premodern thought.

I completed my Ph.D. in History at Johns Hopkins in 2022. My dissertation,Feeling Ancient: Pasts Present in the Quattrocento, offered historical and theoretical arguments for feeling-as-thought in premodernity, explored via case studies of Petrarch, Ciriaco d'Ancona, Angelo Poliziano, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Girolamo Savonarola, and the AldineHypnerotomachia Poliphili[1499]. Prior to Hopkins, I received an M.A. in Classics at the University of Kentucky (2017) along with graduate certificates from theInstitutum Studiis Latinis Provehendisand the Committee on Social Theory.

I began my career as a high school Latin and Ancient Greek teacher in suburban New Jersey, where I was recognized by students for my innovative and engaging instruction, including active Latin strategies. I am particularly interested in topics related to applied second-language acquisition (SLA), emotion and learning, inclusive classrooms, and mentoring FLI-URM student populations. I am also invested in opportunities for collaboration between K-12, post-secondary, and community educational contexts; I always welcome messages from potential outreach/impact partners.

I enjoy collaborating with others to pursue positive, community-driven change and investment at the departmental, divisional, and university levels. Past projects include service on a vice-provost's graduate student advisory committee, employment with a center for teaching excellence and innovation, a part-time position in a dean's office for undergraduate curriculum, and a wide range of union advocacy and lobbying initiatives. In every context, I believe that the trust built by democratic consensus through shared governance is essential for institutional success.

/alan-van-den-arend

Modern building lit up at dusk, seen from above

Arts and Sciences welcomes eight new Klarman Fellows

The incoming cohort of fellows will explore subjects ranging from the evolution of primate lifespans to urban public art in China to the effects of uncertainty and debt on financial decision-making.