Fellowships News | Meet the 2019-20 Fellows in Hellenic Studies

The CHS is pleased to announce the 2019-20 Fellows in Hellenic Studies. The fellowship program encourages research of the highest quality on topics related to ancient Greece. The program offers residential and non-residential options, and seeks to support collaborative and coordinating projects.
Simona Aimar is an assistant professor of philosophy at UCL. Her current research focuses on modality and causation in ancient and contemporary debates. She looks at both ancient and contemporary metaphysics and semantics. Broader interests include philosophy of mind, social philosophy, and feminist philosophy.
Carol Atack works on classical Greek political thought and intellectual history. She holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge (2014), and undergraduate degrees in Classics (Cambridge) and Government (London School of Economics). Her doctoral thesis is currently being revised for publication as The Discourse of Kingship in Classical Greece. She has held teaching positions in ancient history and classical literature at the University of Warwick and St Hugh’s College, University of Oxford, and was recently a post-doctoral researcher on the Anachronism and Antiquity project at Oxford, contributing to the monograph Anachronism and Antiquity (written with Tim Rood and Tom Phillips; forthcoming, Bloomsbury). Carol has published several articles and book chapters on topics in Greek political thought, including political thought in the pseudo-Platonic letters, Aristotle’s thought on kingship, and Foucault on Plato on frank speech. She serves as associate editor for Greek political thought for the journal Polis. While at the Center for Hellenic Studies Carol will be working on Xenophon’s ethical thought, in particular the relevance of aristocratic virtues of excellence to contemporary ethical concepts and their application.
Robert Cioffi is Assistant Professor of Classics at Bard College. His research interests and recent publications center on Greek prose fiction of the Roman imperial period and travel, ethnography, and identity in the ancient world. He is currently completing a monograph on the ethnographic discourse of the Greek novels, entitled Narrating the Marvelous: The Greek Novel and the Ancient Ethnographic Imagination. Recent publications include articles on epiphany in the Greek novels, the relationship between Greek and Roman novels, and travel in the Roman world. In addition to his scholarly publications, he is a contributor to the London Review of Books. He is also developing two new areas of research. The first is focused on the Renaissance reception of the Greek novels. The second is about the representation of ghosts and the supernatural in Greek literature.
Aileen Das is currently an Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian with training in Classics, she is interested in how Greco-Roman and medieval Islamicate authors articulate categories of knowledge such as ‘medicine’, ‘philosophy’, and ‘science’. Her first book, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, under contract) examines the concept of disciplinarity, especially the ways in which boundaries are drawn between disciplines in contests for epistemic authority. In particular, it considers the polemical use of Plato’s cosmological dialogue by the Greek doctor Galen of Pergamum (d. c. 217) to contest philosophy’s exclusive right to define, describe, and explain the different domains of reality. She argues that, in so doing, Galen sets out to establish medicine as a reliable authority on not only the body but also the soul and the wider cosmos. Finally, this study shows that Galen’s engagement with the Timaeus became a touchstone for Islamicate thinkers’ own disciplinary agendas. Her second project (The Art in Brief: Time and Exegesis in Greco-Roman and Islamicate Medicine), to which she will turn her attention during her stay at the CHS, looks at the role of brevity in scientific discourse, particularly how Greek and Arabic epitomatory writings claim to compress all of the art of medicine into a few set truths.
Riccardo Ginevra received his PhD in Historical-Comparative Linguistics in 2018 from the Università per Stranieri di Siena (Italy) in joint supervision with the University of Cologne (Germany). Before that, he studied Classics (BA 2012; MA 2014) with a focus on Archaic Greek epic poetry and historical linguistics at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano (Italy). In his doctoral dissertation, he analyzed the onomastics and the phraseology occurring in the Old Norse mythological poem Vǫluspá ‘Prophecy of the Seeress’ and in other traditional Germanic texts from the perspective of historical linguistics, systematically taking into consideration the comparative evidence attested in Ancient Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hittite, and Celtic languages, among others. He has published, given talks, and taught at the university level on the comparative analysis and reconstruction of Indo-European poetic formulas, theonyms, and myths. As a Fellow of the CHS, he will carry out a systematical study of the phraseology, thematic structures, and onomastics of the Greek myth of Kore and Demeter as attested in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (and related texts), with particular focus on their Indo-European background and on the interplay between inherited poetics and narrative motifs of areal diffusion.
Theodora Jim is Assistant Professor in Ancient Greek History at the University of Nottingham, UK. After completing both her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford, she held a Society of Scholars Fellowship at the University of Hong Kong, followed by a permanent Lectureship in Ancient History at Lancaster University. Actively engaged in anthropological approaches, she is interested in studying Greek Religion in comparative and interdisciplinary contexts; in particular, she is interested in questions of belief and the piety of ordinary individuals. She is the author of Sharing with the Gods: Aparchai and Dekatai in Ancient Greece (Oxford, 2014). During her fellowship at the CHS, she will be exploring the concept of soteria in Greek polytheism and how it compares to that in Christianity.
Yannis Kalliontzis has studied Greek history, archaeology and epigraphy in Athens, Paris and Neuchâtel. His dissertation on the history and epigraphy of Hellenistic Boiotia will be published as a monograph by the French School at Athens in 2020. He has worked on the epigraphy of various regions, but his many focus is Boiotia. In collaboration with K. Hallof, N. Papazarkadas and J. Curbera, he is currently preparing a new edition of the corpus of the inscriptions of Thebes and its hinterland for the Inscriptiones Graecae series of the Berlin Academy. He is also collaborating with G. Biard on the history and archaeology of the sanctuary of the Muses in the Valley of the Muses in Askra (Boiotia) under the auspices of the Ecole française d’Athènes. While at  CHS he is planning to finish work on the philological and epigraphical testimonia on the Valley of the Muses.
K. Scarlett Kingsley is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta, GA. She holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University (2010-16). Her first book project, which has been awarded a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for the academic year 2019-20, explores early Greek historiography as a genre in dialogue with Presocratic intellectual culture. Her recent publications include a chapter on Herodotus’ citation at 3.38 of Pindar fr.169a and a forthcoming article in Classical Quarterly on Thucydides 2.77, the philosopher Anaxagoras, and the repurposing of a Homeric simile. At the CHS, she will complete a co-authored monograph with Tim Rood (St. Hugh’s, Oxford). The monograph interrogates the end of Herodotus’ Histories as an entrée to debates on luxury, migration, and empire in the text as a whole and in debates current in the fifth century. The monograph juxtaposes this closural moment with a series of reception studies – from Thucydides to Erasmus – that engage with it.
Amy Lather is currently an Assistant Professor of Classics at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, NC. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 2016 with a dissertation entitled “Sense and Sensibility: The Experience of Poikilia in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought.” She has published articles on artificial intelligence, musical aesthetics, and sense experience in archaic Greek poetry and Attic tragedy and is currently working on her first monograph, Matters of the Mind: Materiality and Aesthetics in Ancient Greek Thought.
Evi Margaritis is Assistant Professor at the Science and Technology in Archaeology Research Center, specializing in archaeobotany. Her BA comes from the University of Athens and her MSc in Environmental Archaeology and Palaeoeconomy from the University of Sheffield. She then moved to Cambridge, as a Bill Gates Foundation Scholar, to undertake her PhD. She is one of the leading experts in archaeobotanical research in the east Mediterranean and the only archaeobotanist based in Cyprus. Her work has focused on Bronze Age agricultural practices and the beginning of urbanization in the Aegean, ritual use of plants, and urban and rural landscapes of the Classical period. She has generated one of the largest data sets of archaeobotanical remains for these research themes, and published widely on her results. She has also focused on the olive and grape remains and she has contributed to the interpretation of these remains worldwide. Currently she is the assistant director of the Cambridge Keros Excavation Project, one of the most multidisciplinary projects in East Mediterranean, where she is in charge of the Environmental Studies of the project. She has also organized a field school, the Cambridge-CyI field school, for training the next generation of archaeologists. Dr Margaritis has been acting as a reviewer for peer reviewed journals such as Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, Journal of Archaeological Science and American Journal of Archaeology.
Domenico Giuseppe Muscianisi grew up in Sicily and was struck early on with a passion for Antiquity since he was surrounded by the ancient Greek ruins which can be found throughout his native island. In fact, his town, Milazzo, is an eighth-century colony founded by the Euboeans. After earning a BA in Classics and Linguistics in Milan with a thesis on the prosodic word in Mycenaean Linear B inscriptions and being granted a MA in 2012 with a thesis on the metrical anomalies in the Delphic oracles, he travelled around Europe to further his studies. With a dissertation on the etymology of some hapax legomena divine epithets witnessed in the inscriptions of the Cyclades, he earned a joint PhD in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics (2017) at the University of Macerata and the University of Cologne. During his PhD he joined the Department of Humanities as an adjunct instructor of Linguistics and Ethnolinguistics at the IULM University in Milan. Furthermore, as a journalist and a ballet dancer, his academic interests range from anthropology and material culture to rhythm and music. These skills have enhanced his performative approach to Classics and ancient Greek civilization. At the Center for Hellenic Studies he explores orality and prosody in Greek poetry through language, epigraphy and meter.
Peter A. O’Connell is an assistant professor of Classics and Communication Studies at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia. He received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees from Harvard and an M. Phil. degree from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Frank Knox Memorial Fellow. He has also been a Mellon Fellow in the Humanities at Stanford. He works primarily on Attic oratory, and his book, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory, was published in 2017. Interested in all areas of ancient Greek literature, he has recently written articles on Sappho and Gregory of Nazianzus’s poetry.
Manuela Pellegrino holds a master’s degree and PhD in anthropology from University College of London. Since 2006, her research among Griko-speakers and activists in Grecìa Salentina (Apulia, Southern Italy) and ‘aficionados of Griko’ in Greece has formed the basis of her PhD thesis and resultant publications. Her work highlights the transformative effects on the ground of the interplay of language ideologies and policies promoted by the EU, Italy, and Greece to protect Griko, a language of Greek origins; this process has enhanced locally a general ‘revival’ mobilizing cultural heritage more broadly as a resource for the future. More recently she was awarded a fellowship at the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH), Smithsonian Institution (Jan 2018-June 2019). Her fellowship with the CHS will allow her to focus on her new project on the protest movements against the environmental crisis affecting Salento and Greece; this moves beyond language revival but she continues to study cultural heritage as a resource from the past, for the future. In particular, she is interested in assessing the relevance of ancient Greek thought to the management of the current environmental crisis and in investigating the role that the cultural heritage of Hellenism plays in shaping contemporary relationships between Greece and Italy. Her research reflects a longstanding interest, as she originally comes from Zollino, a village belonging to Grecìa Salentina. Her research interests include: language ideologies, cultural heritage, identity politics, Hellenism, historicity and temporality, environmental issues and conflicts, Italy, Greece.
Rachele Pierini was trained in Classical Philology at the University of Bologna and in Historical and Comparative Linguistics in Madrid. She is a philologist and a linguist who specializes in Bronze Age Aegean scripts, with a focus on Linear B. After having held several Post-Doctoral Fellowships (University of Bologna) and having spent a number of research periods abroad as Visiting Scholar in internationally renowned universities (Complutense University of Madrid; University of Cambridge), she is currently a Teaching Tutor in the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Bologna and has been recently awarded the prize of Cultural Ambassador by her native country. Her research mainly concerns the Greek language, both in its diachronic development (especially its initial stages, from the Proto-Indo-European origins to the earliest Linear B attestations) and in its relationship with substratum and nearby languages. During her fellowship at the CHS, Rachele will be working on her monograph on some Linear B idiosyncratic (linguistic and palaeographic) features within the framework of Indo-European languages.
Timothy Rood is Professor of Greek Literature at the University of Oxford, where he is Dorothea Gray Fellow at St Hugh’s College. His main research interests are Greek historiography and its reception. He is the author of Thucydides: Narrative and Explanation, The Sea! The Sea! The Shout of the Ten Thousand in the Modern Imagination and American Anabasis: Xenophon and the Idea of America from the Mexican War to Iraq; with Luuk Huitink he has edited Xenophon: Anabasis Book III for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series. Since 2016 he has led the Leverhulme-funded project ‘Anachronism and Antiquity’. His project at the CHS is a collaboration with Scarlett Kingsley on a book provisionally entitled The End of the Histories: Land, Wealth, and Empire in Herodotus.
Emilio Rosamilia completed his PhD in Classics and Ancient History at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa (2016). After his defense, he served as a postdoctoral research assistant at the same institution for the Greek Envoys and Diplomacy in the Hellenistic and Roman World project (2017) and subsequently held the Italian Fellowship in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome (2018). Member of the Italian Archeological Mission to Cyrene since 2012, he has also held visiting fellowships at the École Française d’Athènes (2012 and 2014), the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2013), and the Kommission für alte Geschichte und Epigraphik in Munich (2016). His research focuses mainly on the study of political, institutional, economic, and social aspects of ancient Greek civilization through inscriptions. While he has published widely on artisans and artists in Greek colonial environments, he is currently revising his PhD thesis on the institutional and economic history of ancient Cyrene during the Classical and Hellenistic periods, which will be submitted for publication to the Edizioni della Normale (Pisa) in May 2019. The purpose of his research at the CHS is to study royal gifts of silver and gold cups mentioned in temple inventories dating from the Hellenistic period from a mainly numismatic point of view. Starting from the new edition of a Cyrenaean document, he will try to shed light on the hoarding and spending dynamics of non-monetized silver and gold in Hellenistic courts.
Matthew Simonton received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University. Since 2013 he has been Assistant Professor of Ancient History at Arizona State University. His first book, Classical Greek Oligarchy: A Political History (Princeton 2017), received the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award. He has published on Classical Greek political institutions, revolution and civil war in antiquity, and processes of history-writing and collective memory. His next book will be a study of ancient Greek demagoguery from the Classical to Imperial periods.
Konstantinos Vlassopoulos studied ancient history at the universities of Athens, Crete and Cambridge. Between 2005-2015 he worked as Lecturer and Associate Professor in Greek History at the University of Nottingham, before moving to the University of Crete, where he is currently Assistant Professor in Greek History. His research interests include the social and economic history of the ancient Greek world, the history of slavery, the history of intercultural relations in antiquity, the history of political thought and the historiography of ancient history. He is the author of Unthinking the Greek Polis: Ancient Greek History beyond Eurocentrism (2007); Politics: Antiquity and its Legacy (2010); and Greeks and Barbarians (2013). He has co-edited the volumes Slavery, Citizenship and the State (2009); Communities and Networks in the Ancient Greek World (2015); and Violence and Community: Law, Space and Identity in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean World (2017). He is currently co-editing the Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries.
Yvona Trnka-Amrhein (PhD Harvard University) is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her research focuses on the ancient novel, biography, and papyrology, and her project at the CHS is to complete her book on the legend of Pharaoh Sesostris. This project contextualizes the fragmentary Sesonchosis Novel as part of a multifaceted tradition that crossed genres, cultures, and eras. In addition, she is interested in Hellenistic poetry, hymns, prophecy, automata, and the relationship between Greek and Egyptian literature.
Erika L. Weiberg is an assistant professor of Classics at Florida State University. She received her BA from Davidson College and her PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published on Greek tragedy and is currently completing a book on the Athenian home front and wives of returning veterans in Greek drama. Her research interests center on feminist approaches to antiquity.

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