Graduate Students
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Lilla Attar
Classics, Entry Year: 2024Lilla received a B.A. in History, summa cum laude, and an LL.B. in Law, magna cum laude, both from Tel-Aviv University. After an articled clerkship at the Association for Civil Liberties in Israel and the Supreme Court, Lilla returned for an M.A. in Ancient History at Tel Aviv University. The topics Lilla is interested in are among others the adoption of the Alphabet in the Greek-speaking world (as well as neighboring cultures), the history of writing on human bodies, and the notion of unwritten laws in archaic and classical Greece.
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Mac Carley
Classics, Entry Year: 2018Mac Carley's work focuses on space and spatial theory in the ancient Mediterranean. Mac's dissertation, titled "Dramatic Space, Culture, and Performance in Republican Italy", seeks to bring together disparate methodologies to form a more integrated and interdisciplinary view of ancient spectacle and spectacular space. Other interests include engaged pedagogy, queer theory, and digital humanities. Before coming to Brown, Mac attended Stanford University and worked as a tour guide in Rome.
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Maggie Danaher
Classics, Entry Year: 2022Maggie Danaher received her MSt in Greek and Latin Languages and Literatures from the University of Oxford (Worcester College) in 2021 and her BA in Classical Studies and Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania in 2020. She is interested in Greek and Roman comedy, the ancient novel, and translation studies.
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Benjamin Driver
Classics, Entry Year: 2018Benjamin Driver is a PhD candidate writing a dissertation which is for now cumbersomely entitled "Per Fraudem Terram Movere: Encomium, Catasterism, and Apotheosis via Intertextuality in the Copernican Revolution." The dissertation is a literary history covering the years 1460-1810 that investigates how panegyrical peritexts (mostly dedicatory epistles and poems) of Latin astronomical treatises lent credence to new discoveries by allusively coöpting classical authorities. Before coming to Brown he spent a few years teaching Latin and French at the high school level. His undergraduate degree is in Classics from Dartmouth College. In his free time he enjoys reading, hiking, looking at birds, and playing video games.
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Caitlin Fennerty
Classics, Entry Year: 2017Caitlin earned her BA in Liberal Arts from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Upon graduating, she taught literature and philosophy seminars to high-school seniors at a classical charter school in Arizona before attending a three-year Latin and Ancient Greek post-baccalaureate program at Georgetown University. From her study of a broad range of poets and prose authors,she has developed a fascination for the emergence and role of fiction in Greek and Roman literature and how conceptions of truthfulness and artifice inform early literary self-consciousness in antiquity.
Caitlin’s current research has focused on the Odyssey, and the ways this text may express Archaic self-conscious reflection on the tension between poetic artifice and truth. She hopes to better define this early consciousness and to use it as a backdrop for understanding the ways later Classical and Hellenistic authors engage with ideas about poetry.
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Isabella Grunberger-Kirsh
Classics, Entry Year: 2017Ella completed a BA and MSt at the University of Oxford before moving to the USA to teach various classical courses for two years at Marlboro College, a small liberal arts college in Vermont. Ella is interested in the history and literature of the Later Roman Empire, and has previously engaged particularly closely with the works of Augustine and Ausonius.
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Sheldon Hallock
Classics, Entry Year: 2024Sheldon Hallock received his MA in Latin, Greek, and Classical Humanities from the University of Massachusetts Boston in 2024, and his BA in Ancient History and Classical Studies from SUNY Potsdam in 2020. From 2020 to 2022 he attended the University of Pennsylvania's post-baccalaureate program on classical languages. Sheldon is interested in Imperial poetry, Graeco-Roman comedy, ancient religion, intertextuality, historiography, and linguistics.
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Sonja Hansen
Classics, Entry Year: 2022Sonja received her B.A. in Classical Studies from Western Washington University in 2018, and then her M.A. in Classical Studies from McGill University in 2021. Her master’s papers explored reception of Catullus’ mourning poems & fragmentation of/in the corpus of Sappho.
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Douglas Hill
Classics, Entry Year: 2016Doug studied Religion at Columbia University School of General Studies, where he graduated summa cum laude. His thesis explored ways of understanding the character Karna, an ambivalent figure in the Mahabharata. After working at the Earth Institute at Columbia, Doug attended CUNY’s Summer Latin Institute and then pursued post-baccalaureate studies in Latin and Greek at CUNY-Hunter College. While at Hunter, Doug presented a paper on satirical features in Seneca’s Thyestes at the Sunoikisis Undergraduate Research Symposium at the Center for Hellenic Studies.
Doug’s interests currently include Lucretius and Apuleius and their attitudes toward religion.
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Ronnie Hirsch
Classics, Entry Year: 2023Ronnie received her MA in Classics after receiving a BA in Classics and General History, both from Tel Aviv University. Prior to joining Brown, she taught high-school-level history and founded a digital platform and podcast for public historical education. Her interests include Cicero's philosophical writing, the intersection of historiography and political thought in antiquity, and political culture in Rome.
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Clare Kearns
Classics, Entry Year: 2020Clare came to Brown in 2020, after receiving her BA with a double major in Classics and Comparative Literature from The University of Pennsylvania. Her research focuses on representations of raced and gendered social marginality in Greek fiction written under the Roman Empire. She has a secondary interest in moments of Classical Reception in Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa. These two projects are conceptually united by the common threads of identity and empire.
Clare is also pursuing Brown’s graduate certificate in Gender and Sexuality Studies through the Pembroke Center. In her free time, she enjoys hiking and exploring New England.
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Michaiah Kojoian
Classics, Entry Year: 2024Michaiah Kojoian received her BA in Classics (minor in Mathematics) from Providence College with an Honors Thesis entitled “Beneath the Surface: Hadrian’s Underground Contributions to Roman Greece.” She was also the recipient of the Leroy D. Aaronson, M.D. Award for Academic Excellence in Undergraduate Studies in Greek and Latin and the Highest GPA Award in the Department of History and Classics. In 2024 she graduated with her MA in Classics from Tufts University where she also served as a Teaching Assistant for undergraduate language and ‘culture’ courses. As a graduate student, she contributed digitally edited editions of selected Greek and Latin texts in the form of treebanks (in which every word, phrase, and clause is fully morphologically and syntactically identified, and dependent upon the word, phrase, or clause it modifies) to the Perseids Project (a subset of the Perseus Project). She was one of the winners for the department’s translation contest in 2022, and won Second Place and ‘People’s Choice’ at Tufts University’s Graduate Student Council’s Three-minute Thesis Competition (3MT) in 2023. Her thesis, directed by Professor Andreola Rossi and entitled “Novus Heros: A Narratological Study of Aeneas’ Apologoi in Light of Homer’s Odyssey,” investigated the narrational strategies of Aeneas and Odysseus throughout their respective hero’s stories. Her research interests include Greek and Latin epic poetry, aqueduct construction, Republican and early Imperial Rome, and early Christian texts.
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Itamar Levin
Ancient History, Entry Year: 2019Itamar Levin is a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of Classics, specializing in ancient history. His research combines traditional philology with contemporary frameworks to explore the relationship between power and culture in ancient Greek society. In his two forthcoming publications, “Legal Death and Odysseus’ Kingship” (The Classical Quarterly) and “News and the Family in Ancient Greece” (The Classical Journal), he illuminates tacit cultural institutions in antiquity by applying notions from legal theory and communication studies. He is currently working on his dissertation, which expands the concept of necropower and develops a methodology for studying the politics of commemoration in ancient Greek society. Specifically, he focuses on cenotaphs and the instrumentalizing of the absent dead for the (re)production of civic ideology. His work is situated within broader scholarly conversations about the role of power in shaping cultural practices and the ethical responsibilities of scholars in examining these dynamics.
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Kiran Mansukhani
Classics, Entry Year: 2022Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani received his MA in Classics from The Graduate Center, CUNY in 2022 and an AB in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College in 2017. His interests include ancient Greek epistemology, ancient philosophy more broadly, and the reception of Plato in South and Southeast Asian political thought. His writing can be seen in the upcoming Routledge volume, Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics, the Society for Classical Studies’ Professional Blog, and Eidolon. His full CV can be found on his academia.edu page.
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Lucy McInerney
Classics, Entry Year: 2017Lucy received her MPhil in Greek and Latin Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford in 2017, after having graduated from Dickinson College in 2015 with a BA in Classical Studies. Her Master's thesis looked at Vergil's use of ethnographic language in the second half of the Aeneid, and was concerned with the conflict between depictions of ethnic diversity among the Italian gentes and a narrative of cultural homogeneity between Roman and Italian.
While she remains interested in questions of identity and self-representation in the late Republic, Lucy is particularly looking forward to broadening her knowledge of ancient authors at Brown.
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Alvaro Pires
Classics, Entry Year: 2014Alvaro earned his B.A. in Classical Studies from Santa Clara University in 2011 and his M.A. in Classics from the University of Arizona in 2014, where he received awards for ancient Greek and academic excellence. His Master's thesis examined how Boethius articulates a program for reading the Consolation of Philosophy through reference to Propertius and adaption of Callimachean poetics in the work's two elegiac metra.
In this vein, Alvaro's research revolves primarily around Augustan literature and its transmission, and he hopes to broaden and deepen his studies in Latin literary culture, late antiquity, and reception during his time at Brown. He has also studied paleography, and intends to develop this skill over the course of his doctoral program.
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Davide Luigi Pironi
Classics, Entry Year: 2024Davide received his M.A. in Philology, Literatures and History of the Ancient World from Sapienza University of Rome in 2024 and his B.A. in Classics from the University of Milan in 2022, after completing Liceo Classico in a small town in Northern Italy. His research interests include Latin epigraphy and Roman social history, with a special focus on identity issues in Cisalpine Gaul during the early Imperial period. In particular, Davide’s work seeks to analyze how deeply the Roman conquest affected marginal centers and their populations –socially, politically, and culturally – by combining historical, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence.
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Vivian Sandifer
Classics, Entry Year: 2024Vivian received her BA in Classical Languages from Bryn Mawr College in 2024. Her senior thesis analyzed manipulation as used by women in Homeric epic. She is interested in archaic Greek epic, narratology, women in the ancient world, and weaving in Greek and Latin literature.
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Meg Sanglikar
Classics, Entry Year: 2024Meg Sanglikar earned both a BA in Classics and a BS in Molecular Biology from the University of Pittsburgh in 2021. She received an MA in Classics from the University of Chicago in 2022, where she wrote a thesis dissecting the portrayal of Livia and the domus Augusta in the first four books of the Annales. Her research combines philological and historiographical analysis of various writers such as Suetonius, Tacitus, and Cassius Dio in order to examine the relationship between imperial power, propaganda, rhetoric, and transmission.
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Fiona Sappenfield
Classics, Entry Year: 2016Fiona earned her BA in Literae Humaniores from the University of Oxford (New College) in 2016. Her interests include epic and the treatment of nature in ancient literature. Her thesis is on the role of the sea in Latin literature.
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Nick Trcalek
Classics, Entry Year: 2023Nick Trcalek received a Bachelor’s degree in History and Classics summa cum laude from Texas A&M University in 2020 and a Master’s degree in Classical Studies with Historical Emphasis from Tufts University in 2023. His Master’s thesis, entitled “Mapping the Via Hadrumetina and its Roman Period Landscape”, investigated settlement and land use in an important agricultural and political region of Africa Proconsularis. His interests lie in all things pertaining to the ancient world, but, in particular, the Early and Middle Roman Republic as well as North Africa throughout all periods of antiquity."
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Preston Walker
Classics, Entry Year: 2019Preston received a B.A. in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013 and an M.A. in Religious Studies from Wake Forest University in 2019. For four years, Preston taught high school Latin and Classical Rhetoric. His research interests lie generally in late antique Latin literature, and more specifically in the transformation of traditional Roman mores during the spread of Christianity in the fourth and fifth centuries CE.
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Qizhen Xie
Ancient History, Entry Year: 2019, ABDQizhen earned his M.A. in History at University of New Hampshire in 2019. His main interest lies in the Hellenistic world, particularly in the development of administration and bureaucracy from early to mid Hellenistic period (cir. 300-150 BCE). At Brown, Qizhen wishes to further explore questions concerning how the romance of “spear-won land (δορίκτητος χώρα)” was grounded in and realized through fiscality and day-to-day management.
He earned his B.A. from University of New Hampshire with a double major in History (honors) and Classics in 2016. In the summer of 2015, he had the honor of joining the excavation at Çadır Höyük in Yozgat, Turkey from which he studied an extensive amount of material evidence for his Honors Thesis titled The Ethnic Identity and Redefinition of the Galatians in the Hellenistic World. Between 2016 and 2017, he worked for Dickinson College in editing digital Latin-Chinese and Greek Chinese lexicons, taking advantage of his training in Greek and Latin and background as a native Chinese speaker. The interactions between the East and West, whether during the antiquity or modernity, are also of his interest.
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Michael Ziegler
Classics, Entry Year: 2019Michael received a B.A. with Highest Honors in Philosophy and a B.A. in Classics from the University of Virginia in 2015. His honors thesis dealt with competing theories of practical rationality in connection with Socrates’ theory of pleasure in Protagoras. After undertaking an independent research project on Works and Days at the Seminar für Klassische Philologie at the Universität Heidelberg, he entered the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, where he wrote a thesis on non-human animal perception in Hierocles’ Elements of Ethics.
Michael’s hobbies include cycling and devouring news about Chicago municipal politics.