Hannah Cochran is a third-year PhD student. She received a BA in Classical Studies and a BA in History from the University of Puget Sound in 2019, and then completed a post-baccalaureate program in Classics at the Columbia University in 2021. Her research interests include Roman history and literature, the history and reception of Alexander the Great, the memory of the Roman Republic in Imperial literature and culture, Latin epigraphy, and Augustan poetry, especially Ovid's exile poetry. As an undergraduate, she helped write entries on Pompeiian graffiti for inclusion in the Epigraphic Database Roma as part of the Ancient Graffiti Project. Email: hc3432@nyu.edu
Graduate Students
Zoe Blecher-Cohen is a fifth-year graduate student pursuing her M.A. in Classics at NYU and her M.L.I.S. at Long Island University through a joint dual degree program. She graduated from McGill University in 2017 with a B.A.Sc. in Classics and Psychology. Zoe has presented and published at the undergraduate level on a variety of topics including: epitaphs and Roman social psychology, magic and sexuality, and Roman opinions on lesbians. In 2015, she participated in a workshop on “Information Fluency in Classics” at the Center for Hellenic Studies, which sparked an interest in combining her background in archives with her passion for Classics. Her current interests include information access and literacy in Classics research, using datasets and other digital technology to approach traditional topics in new ways, and more generally combining Library Science techniques with Classics research questions. E-mail: zbc210@nyu.edu
Figen Geerts is a sixth-year PhD student. She received her BA with Honors from the University of Amsterdam (2017). In her dissertation, ‘Communicating Cure: The cult of Asklepios in Hellenistic Greece,’ she traces the emergence of a novel ‘health culture’ in Greek antiquity from ca. 500 BCE-100 CE. In particular, she argues, through a discussion of Asklepios’ healing cult, that the Greeks viewed health as a profoundly holistic process, aimed at the repair of a patient’s socioeconomic status rather than merely the symptoms of their disease. She is currently a visiting research student at King’s College London (2022-2023). Email: ffg219@nyu.edu
Greta Gualdi is a fifth-year graduate student in the Classics Department at New York University. She received her B.A. (2015) and M.A. (2017) from University of Pavia, after spending a year abroad at Leiden University thanks to an Erasmus grant; her M.A. thesis dealt with Homeric para-literary texts from educational contexts. She spent the year prior to this teaching Latin, ancient history, and Italian literature in an Italian Liceo Classico. Her research interests currently concern ancient education, rhetoric, and intertextuality in the Greco-Roman world and late antiquity. She has quite recently begun to deepen her interest in the reception of Greek and Latin texts in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Email: gg1967@nyu.edu
Pei He is a third-year PhD student. She received her B.A. in Mathematical Decision Sciences from UNC-Chapel Hill, her Ph.D. in Statistics from Stanford University, and then her M.A. in Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University. Her M.A. thesis is on affect and temporality in Archaic Greek (Sappho) and Classical Chinese lyrics. While having a wide interest in lyrics, drama, and narratives of the Greco-Roman world, currently her main theoretical focus lies in how affect is evoked in ancient literary texts and how the readerly affect is triggered through the cognitive process of reading those texts. Email: he.pei@nyu.edu
Alexandria Istok is a seventh-year Ph.D. student. Before coming to NYU, she received an M.A. in Early Christian Studies at the University of Notre Dame (2016) and a B.A. in Classics and in Ancient Mediterranean Culture from the University of Alabama (2014). Her research focuses on the social and cultural history of the late Classical world, specifically questions of cultural memory, letters as physical and personal objects, and the intersection of the Classical and early Christian societies. Email: alex.istok@nyu.edu
Mal Main is a second-year PhD student. They received their BA in Classics from the University of Kentucky and their MA in Classics from the University of Arizona. Their primary research interests include Translation Studies, Latin elegy, and the tragedies of Seneca the Younger; they have also presented research on Latin pedagogy, classical reception, and gender in antiquity. Email: mlm9673@nyu.edu
Brooke McArdle is a second-year PhD student. She received her BA in Classical Languages and History from Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Brooke has published in undergraduate journals as well as in Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik. She has also presented at several conferences for Classics, History, and Ancient Near Eastern studies. Her primary research interests include the representation of Eastern women in Classical narratives and Homeric reception of Near Eastern ritual motifs. Brooke's recent scholarship has focused on Homeric hospitality customs and explores their potential relation to similar rituals in Akkadian literary texts. Email: bfm4326@nyu.edu
Ricarda Meisl is a fifth-year Ph.D. student who received her B.A. in Ancient History and Classical Antiquities (2012) as well as Archaeology (2013) and her M.A. in Ancient History (2016) from the Karl-Franzens University in Graz (Austria). Her main research interests lie in the interconnections between democracy, masculinity, and the body in Classical Athens, and the reception of ancient Greece and these concepts in modern times. Additionally, thanks to her B.A. in Archaeology, she has a keen interest in material culture and museum studies, having worked on excavations in Austria, Turkey, and Greece. She was able to expand her knowledge further through a course given by the British School at Athens on Prehistoric, Greek, and Roman pottery at Knossos and while working at the Museum of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge (UK) and the Archäologische Sammlungen of the Karl-Franzens University. Email: rm5284@nyu.edu
Emma Louise Mendez Correa, who originally is from Amsterdam, is a second-year PhD student at the Classics Department of NYU. She received her BA (2019) and research MA (2022, cum laude) in Classics from Leiden University. Her research interests mainly concern consumption and pleasure in the ancient world, with a focus on Archaic Greek poetry. She prefers to work interdisciplinarily, depending mostly on the social sciences. Next to having been part of several university-wide boards and comittees at Leiden University, she also has extensive experience in the commercial publishing industry. Email: em4811@nyu.edu
Frances Merrill is a fifth-year PhD student at NYU. She graduated from the University of Vermont in 2017 with a BA in Classics and in 2019 with a MA in Classics. Her research interests include Latin literature, literary theory, and gender and sexuality. Her recent scholarship focuses on the letters of Pliny the Younger and epistolarity. She lives in Queens with her chihuahua Pickles. Email: fm1714@nyu.edu
Meredith Millar is a fifth-year Ph.D. student. She received her BA in Classics and Art History from UC Berkeley (2015) and her MA in Classics from Tufts University (2019). Her research interests center on the spatial phenomenologies of public monumentalization and habitation from the Hellenistic and Roman periods. She has excavated in Romania and Italy, and is currently co-editing a database overview project for Poggio Civitate, where she is a member of the excavation staff. In Spring 2021, she co-founded the SAIG/GSC Dissertation Lecture, an annual lecture to celebrate forthcoming interdisciplinary graduate research. Meredith is a sitting member of the Graduate Student Committee for the Society for Classical Studies, promoting a closer integration of material and language study within the discipline. Email: mm10416@nyu.edu
Erik Mortensen is a eighth-year Ph.D. student. He received his BA and MA from the University of Kansas (2010 and 2013). He has worked on the narratological structure of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, but his main research focus is Presocratic philosophy. He is currently writing his dissertation on the zoogonical doctrines of Empedocles. Email: ecm405@nyu.edu
Kimball Naughton is a fourth-year PhD student at NYU. Before coming to NYU, they did their BA in Classics and English at the College of Charleston (2018) and their MA in Classical Languages at the University of Georgia (2020). Kimball is currently interested in the creation and representation of social identities in Latin literature, as well as Latin poetry and poetics. Email: sn3022@nyu.edu
Ben Nikota is a seventh-year Ph.D. candidate. He graduated from McGill University in 2012 with a BA in Classics, with minors in History and Western Scriptural Languages. He completed his MA in Classical Languages at the University of Georgia in 2014. He then taught Latin at a middle school in Texas and English at various public and private institutions in Quebec. He is currently writing his dissertation on a corpus of Hellenistic-era Jewish authors preserved via Alexander Polyhistor, who was then cited by late antique Christian apologists and polemicists. His ancillary interests include the use of synchronicistic timekeeping in ancient historiography, Goethe and German Romanticism, and the history of drama and theater from the 5th century Athens to the early modern period. He has delivered papers at conferences hosted by the Ohio State University, Boston University, the North American Goethe Society, as well as at CAMWS' annual meeting. Email: ben233@nyu.edu
Andrea Pozzana is a sixth-year PhD. student. He received his BA in Classics from the University of Udine (2015) and his MA in Greek from the University of St Andrews (2017). His primary interests of study include ancient drama (comedy in particular), Greek lyric, and the reception of Classical culture in Italian literature. Email: ap5353@nyu.edu
Zachary Rosalinsky is a second-year graduate student pursuing his M.A. in Classics at NYU. He graduated from New York University in 2019 with a B.M. in Instrumental Performance, and also graduated in August 2022 with his M.L.I.S. from Long Island University, concentrating in Rare Books and Special Collections through the joint dual-degree program between NYU and LIU Palmer. Zach's main interests are daily life in Roman Republican and early-Imperial urban centers, representations of musicians in Roman literature, and the intersection of Classics and Print and Manuscript Studies from antiquity through today. He is also a library clerk at NYU's Institute for the Study of the Ancient World.
Rebekah Rust is a seventh-year Ph.D. student. She received her B.A. in Classics from UNC Chapel Hill and a M.St. in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford as an Ertegun scholar. Her general interests are in dramatic and choral performances, psychology, emotions, and cognitive linguistics in Greek poetry; and in particular in the aesthetics of literary and conceptual metaphors of emotions in Greek drama. Her doctoral dissertation is a psychological, literary, and dramatic analysis of the metaphors of thumos in Greek tragedy. She is a proponent of Natural Language Processing tools and Natural Language Understanding models as essential components to the modern philologist's toolkie. Her interest in the interweaving of psychology, tragedy, and performance has also led her to work and to present on the reception of Greek tragedy in the 20th century dance of Martha Graham. She has taught Elementary Latin and Classical Mythology and worked as a graduate assistant in the Classics and Computer Science departments and as a recitation preceptor in the CAS CORE program. Email: rebekah.rust@nyu.edu
Rebecca Sausville is a Ph.D. candidate and currently the Innovation and Career Initiatives Fellow at the Modern Language Association (supported by the joint NYU-Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Public Humanities Doctoral Fellowship). She came to NYU in 2015 by way of the University of Kentucky (M.A., Classics; Graduate Certificate, Latin Studies, 2015) and Fordham College at Lincoln Center (B.A., Classics, 2011). Her dissertation focuses on civic expressions of paideia in the Roman east from epigraphic, archaeological, and literary perspectives, a project which germinated during her year as the Michael Jameson fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (2018-2019). Secondary projects and interests include freelance translation, papyrology, ancient and modern pedagogy, and field archaeology (Cyprus, Sicily, and Greece). Email: rsausville@nyu.edu
Stephanie Savage is a fifth-year Ph.D. student at NYU. Before coming to NYU, she earned her M.A. in Classics from the University of Arizona (2019), completed a Post-Baccalaureate program at Georgetown University (2017), and earned her B.A. from the University of Florida (2014) in Classical Studies with minors in both Secondary Education and Anthropology. Her main research interests include the archaeology of the Peloponnese from the Bronze Age through the Hellenistic period, the development of sanctuary spaces, regional variations in culture and religious practices, the intersection of warfare and the archaeological record, and Sparta and her modern reception. Together with both friends and colleagues she is a board member for the Society for Ancient Studies. Email: sls994@nyu.edu
Poppy Steel Swayne is a fifth-year PhD student. She received her BA (2017) and MA (2019) in Classics from Durham University in the UK. Her main research interests are Greek tragedy and Greek and Roman New Comedy, as well as the ancient reception of these in Greek and Latin literature.
Email: pss441@nyu.edu
Andrea Tisano is a fourth-year PhD student. He received his BA in Classics and MA in Classical Philology from the University of Catania, where he also attended the Scuola Superiore di Catania. His main interest of research is the interplay between poetry and philosophy in Classical antiquity. In particular, he has investigated the reception of Hesiod's works and myths in Plato's dialogues. Andrea is also interested in Greek drama and its connection to the visual arts and material culture, in the political implications of tragedy and in the semantics of meter. Email: at4737@nyu.edu
Joshua Williams is a sixth-year Ph.D. student. He received a B.A. in Classics from the University of St. Andrews in 2018. His main interests are Archaic and Classical Greek literature, Greek religion, and ancient philosophy (especially Plato). E-mail: jjw519@nyu.edu
Ari Zatlin is an tenth-year Ph.D. student. He received his B.A. in 2007 from Claremont McKenna College, and spent two years in the Post-baccalaureate program at UCLA beginning in 2009. Since coming to NYU, his research has focused on Latin prose literature, with a particular emphasis on the Letters of Pliny the Younger, on which he is writing a dissertation under the supervision of Joy Connolly. In support of his research, Ari was awarded a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship (2017-18), a Lane Cooper Fellowship (2016-17), and worked for three months as a Global Research Initiative fellow at NYU Berlin in 2016. He has given papers at CAAS (2012 and 2013), the Celtic Conference in Classics (2016), the University of Gießen (2017), and the University of Cyprus (2018). In 2013, Ari anticipated the rise of "Fake News" by co-organizing the graduate conference "The Same Old Lies: Frauds, Forgeries, and Falsehoods in the Ancient World." In addition to several stints as a TA and course preceptor, Ari has taught two years of introductory and intensive Latin, a course on Roman imperial history, and developed and led a summer seminar titled "Science Fiction Before Science," which read ancient texts together with modern Sci-Fi. In addition to his dissertation, he is currently refining a chapter scheduled to be published as a part of a collected volume on audience experience and historiography with Brill.
Email: az787@nyu.edu
Joshua P. Ziesel is a seventh year Ph.D. student. Before coming to NYU, he earned
his BA in Classics with a minor in English Literature at Loyola University Maryland
(2017). His dissertation – “Two Tongues, One Voice: A Study of Interlingual Allusion and
its Reflexive Metaphorization in the Odes of Horace” – is focused on developing a more
complex understanding of Roman conceptualizations of translations by examining
various self-reflexive metaphors which are embedded into its practice. In the summer of
2019, Josh participated in the ongoing excavations at the site of Cosa (Bryn
Mawr/FSU). He has previously served as a co-organizer for the department’s Graduate
Student Speaker Series (2018-19) and the NYU Biennial Graduate Student Classics
conference, "Far from Godliness: Pollution in the Ancient World" (2019). Josh and his
colleague Del A. Maticic co-conducted a year-long virtual workshop on Zoom, "Bad
Intertextuality in Premodern Literary Cultures" (2020-21). He has worked for the
department as a teaching assistant, a CORE recitation instructor, and as a graduate
instructor for Classical Mythology and both Elementary and Intermediate Latin (Prose &
Poetry). During the academic year of 2023-24, Josh will be spending his time as a
visiting student in the Comparative Literature department as a WeTrust Fellow in
Multidisciplinary Classics.Email: jpz242@nyu.edu