Susan Heuck Allen is Visiting Scholar in the Department of Classics at Brown University. She received her Ph.D. in Classics and Classical Archaeology from Brown University, after earning degrees from the University of Cincinnati and Smith College. Her areas of expertise – Troy and the history of archaeology – were combined in her book, Finding the Walls of Troy: Frank Calvert and Heinrich Schliemann at Hisarlik (University of California Press — Berkley, 1999). She is also the author of Excavating Our Past: Perspectives on the History of the Archaeological Institute of America, which is a part of the 2002 AIA Monograph Series, and recently published Classical Spies: American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece (University of Michigan Press, 2011).  Dr. Allen has held positions at Smith College, and Clark and Yale Universities, and has done fieldwork in Cyprus, Israel, and Knossos. She was named a Mellon Fellow in 2008, and has held a number of other fellowships.

Vangelis Calotychos was born and bred in London, U.K. He received his PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, and has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Columbia. Currently Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at Brown, he teaches courses in comparative literature, cultural studies, and reception studies. In the 1990s, his concern for reconciliation after ethnic conflict led him to edit two interdisciplinary and intercommunal volumes about Cyprus. This enduring interest in culture and politics in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Balkans informs his later work, as in Manolis Anagnostakis: Poetry & Politics, Silence & Agency in Post-War Greece (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012). He has published two monographs: Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics (2004) discusses the terms of modernity and “self-colonization” in Greece from just before the founding of the nation state down to the present; and The Balkan Prospect: Identity, Culture, and Politics in Greece After 1989 (2013) offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Greece's position within and without the Balkans and Europe after the Cold War. It was awarded the Edmund Keeley Book Prize. Contributions on the Greek Weird Wave & Beyond for a co-edited special issue of The Journal of Greek Media and Culture (2:2, 2016) grow out of more recent research on resistance in Greek film. He was founder and longtime chair of The Modern Greek Seminar at Columbia (2005-14) and, since 2019, he serves as the Executive Director of the Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA).

Simone Ciambelli is a Tenure-Track Researcher at Alma Mater Studiorum – Università di Bologna (Italy), specializing in the social history of the Roman World and Latin epigraphy. His research focuses on non-élite populations, with particular attention to Roman associations (collegia). Additionally, he explores the reception of Roman history—especially its appropriation by fascism — and the contemporary impact of Greco-Roman studies.

He completed his studies at the University of Milan and the University of Bologna. He earned his Ph.D. in 2020 from both the University of Bologna and the Université de Poitiers (France). He is the author of I collegia e le relazioni clientelari. Studio sui legami di patronato delle associazioni professionali nell’Occidente romano tra I e III sec. d.C.(Pàtron Editore, Bologna 2022).

Currently, he is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Global Research Fellow, working on the project The Intermediate Bodies of the Roman Cities: Sociability and Agency of the Middling Groups in Roman Italy (Late Republic - 3rd c. AD) - InBoRC. This project investigates the political, economic, and social role of non-élite groups in the cities of Roman Italy. The research will be conducted over 18 months in the Department of Classics at Brown University (until August 2026), followed by 6 months at Université Paris Cité and 12 months at the University of Bologna.

Alexandra Courcoula is a Research Associate in the Department of Classics.  She received her PhD from MIT in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art and from the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture. During her doctoral work she was a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.  Before joining Brown she worked as a lecturer at the Boston Architectural College and Hellenic College.  She has also worked in numerous museums including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.  Her work focuses on the history of collecting and museums, as well as nationalism in the Ottoman and post-Ottoman world and in 19th and 20th century Europe. 

Dr. Charis Jo researches theories of classical education from classical antiquity to the modern age, from Ancient Greece and China to modern England and Rwanda. Her particular interest is how the philosophy of language gets expressed (and, in turn, formed) by pedagogy and didactic literature of the liberal arts traditions. Charis earned her DPhil (PhD) in Classics from the University of Oxford with a thesis on Augustine’s De dialectica (OUP, forthcoming). While at Oxford, Charis also founded and co-directed the Janus Project (https://janus-project.org/), held lectureships at Oriel and Magdalen colleges, and founded the Oxford Ancient Languages Society (https://www.oxfordancientlanguages.com/) and Oxford Latinitas (https://www.oxfordlatinitas.org/). At Brown, she is writing a public-facing book on the modern history of classical education.

Lisa Kraege is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Critical Classical Studies. She received her PhD in English from Princeton University in 2024. She studies how ancient models of aesthetic perception and experience were received and deployed in eighteenth-century and Romantic Britain, and the geopolitical and ideological stakes of such interactions. She is at work on a book project that considers the rise of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Britain through a comparison of classical and colonial landscapes. She is also a freelance editor.

Byron MacDougall earned his PhD in Classics from Brown in 2015 with a dissertation entitled "Gregory of Nazianzus and Christian Festival Rhetoric." His research interests focus on Classical rhetoric and philosophy in Late Antique and Byzantine literature. Before returning to Brown, he held research fellowships at Dumbarton Oaks, the University of Vienna, and Princeton. A former secondary school Classics teacher, his publications cover topics including the Cappadocian Fathers, the Ancient Greek and Latin novels, and the reception of Plato from the Second Sophistic to Byzantium.

Felicity E. Palma is an interdisciplinary artist whose work reappropriates and remediates myth in Southern Italy. Her practice is research-based and process-driven, drawing from postcolonial feminist theory, mobility and disability studies, and the philosophy of language. She engages deeply with oral histories, place, and site-specific fieldwork, viewing mythology not as fixed truth but as a living archive where violence, memory, and identity are rewritten.

At Brown, Felicity is developing Eurydice in the Underworld, a series of handmade experimental films adapting Kathy Acker’s volume of the same name. The films render dying landscapes and burning light leaks to contemplate the social isolation, psychosexual crisis, and interior reckoning precipitated by a diagnosis of breast cancer. Situated in the over-touristed and climate-impacted landscape of Southern Italy, the project explores the borderlands between able-bodiedness and disability, or earth and hell. Expanding beyond film, Eurydice also incorporates process-based study of ancient weaving and pottery traditions as meditations on mortality, ecological loss, and the more-than-human world.

Felicity holds a B.A. in Language Studies from UC Santa Cruz, an M.A. in European and Mediterranean Studies from New York University and an M.F.A. in Experimental & Documentary Art from Duke University. Her work has been screened and exhibited internationally, and she is also independently curates  transnational, experimental, arthouse and documentary films for her mobile microcinema project.