Current Fellows in Hellenic Studies

Cecilia Z. Li is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Huron University at Western University in Ontario, Canada. She specializes in ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato, with particular attention to issues at the intersection of epistemology, political philosophy, and ethics. She is also interested in assessing the ongoing relevance of ancient theories to contemporary issues in ethics and political philosophy.  

She received her PhD in 2023 from Western University. Before her doctoral studies, she completed a two-year Master of Arts in Ancient Philosophy at Western. She has published on justice and its relationship to the expertise of ruling in Plato’s Republic. At present, her research focuses on the nature of political rule and the virtue of temperance in the Platonic corpus. 

While at CHS, she will be working on her project on the unity of temperance in Plato’s Charmides. Despite bearing many quintessential features of Plato’s shorter works, the Charmides is methodologically complex and philosophically ambitious. Her project will focus on reviving and resolving an old interpretative puzzle on the dialogue’s ambiguous treatment of temperance both as self-knowledge and as a singular science that has its subject matter all other kinds of knowledge and of itself. The former is developed as resembling Socratic self-knowledge, while the latter is developed with a particular political dimension. She argues that these two senses of temperance are distinct and require reconciliation. Her interpretative strategy is to focus on how the ethical goal motivating Socratic self-knowledge forms the basis for good governance in the political context. 

Mills McArthur holds a PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago (Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World, 2021). Upon receiving his degree, he was named the University of Chicago’s inaugural Abigail Rebecca Cohen Postdoctoral Scholar. Since 2022 he has served as an assistant professor in the History and Political Studies Department at Southern Adventist University, where he is preparing to launch a Classics minor in the fall of 2026.

McArthur’s research deals primarily with the history and epigraphy of fourth-century Athens. His published work explores topics such as manumission records, apprenticeship, and the Athenian fleet. At the Center for Hellenic Studies he will build on his previous research, undertaking a project titled “A Cultural History of Athenian Sea Power.” He also maintains papyrological interests, and is currently writing a book on the provenance of the Aristotelian Athēnaiōn Politeia papyri.

Brennan McDavid is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and member of the Smith Institute for Political Economy and Philosophy at Chapman University in Orange, California. She completed her PhD at Princeton University, where she was a student in the Classical Philosophy Program. Between Princeton and California, she was the first woman to hold the Seymour Readership at Ormond College, a residential college of the University of Melbourne. She specializes in ancient philosophy, with focus particularly on the moral psychology, ethics, and political economy of Plato. During her stay at CHS, she will be developing a monograph that examines Plato’s conception of economic activity in his ideal city, as described in the Republic. Plato’s economic insights are complex and integral to his political theory. Recovering this dimension of his thought enables us to appreciate how comprehensively he imagined his political ideal.

Andrew Merritt is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Classics at Georgetown University. In 2023 he earned a Ph.D. in Classics from Cornell University, where he specialized in Greek, Latin, and Indo-European linguistics. His research occupies the nexus of Indo-European word-formation, Greek etymology, and the analysis of concepts operative in the speech communities ancestral to those of Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and related languages. During the Summer Fellowship period at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Andrew will advance his current book project Beauty and the Beautiful in Greek and Indo-European: A Study in Morphology, Etymology, and Conceptual Relations, which investigates the origin of Ancient Greek καλός ‘beautiful’ from Proto-Indo-European (PIE) by shedding light on how the sounds, forms, and ideas of PIE speakers gave shape to καλός in the earliest Greek literature.

2026-27 Full Year Residential Fellows

Francesca Beretta works at the intersection of classical philology and contemporary performance theory. She received her PhD in Classics and Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2024. She then joined St Anne’s College (Oxford) as the Plumer Junior Research Fellow in Classics. While at the CHS, she will complete her first monograph. Titled The Motionscape of Greek Tragedy, the book elucidates how tragedies construct meaning through movement, understood as a language with its own set of building blocks, syntax, and grammar. The term “motionscape” conveys the multifaceted and polykinetic interpretive horizon that results from the examination of the interdependency between the syntax of movement understood as a physical act and the idea that verbal language bears the traces of a kinetic approach to world making. The book defamiliarises the extant corpus of Greek tragic drama by thinking against a binary understanding of text and performance as two wholly distinct engagements with movement. Furthermore, it proposes a new way of reading space, time, and affect in tragedy as kinetically created. These contributions highlight the broadening of our hermeneutic horizons on Greek tragedy by emphasizing the scope that movement affords, and the resulting motionscape that emerges from looking at tragedy through a kinetic lens.  

Zhixi Wang works on ancient Greek philosophy, esp. Plato’s cosmology and metaphysics. She has been an assistant professor at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin after receiving her PhD there. Her dissertation, Uncrafted Nature in Plato’s Creationism, investigates Plato’s position on the nature/craft antithesis that is central to the debate between creationism and its opponents, focusing on the nature (sic) of fire, water, earth and air in the precosmos of the Timaeus and how this nature relates to the Forms.

Zhixi will initiate a new project at the CHS: The Inanimate, the Animate and the Virtuous: Plato on Self-Motion and Freedom. While Plato’s take on freedom has often been explored from an ‘inward’, moral-psychological perspective, which primarily concerns how our different psychic elements work together to yield our actions, it has been less explored from an ‘outward’, metaphysical-cosmological perspective, which primarily concerns how we and our actions fit into the physical universe. This project aims to (1) fill in this ‘outward’ perspective by exploring Plato’s theory of self-motion as a defining capacity of the soul, and subsequently (2) spell out the relation between these two perspectives. The central questions are: (1) If we can move ourselves while stones cannot, does this grant us some kind of freedom that stones lack? (2) If the virtuous, reason-driven person is in some sense freer than the non-virtuous, desire-driven person, is the latter nonetheless free in some way that a stone is not? If so, is there one notion of freedom at play, or two different ones?

Fall 2026 Fellows in Residence

Christopher Atkins received his Ph.D. from Yale University in 2025 and is Assistant Professor of Classics at Baylor University. His research moves between Greek and Roman philosophy and religion, and a major thread of his recent work traces the relationship between philosophical discourse and lived religious experience. At the CHS he will be working on a project examining how Plato’s dialogues engage with and reframe popular religion in classical Athens. Other topics in his recent and ongoing work include Stoic cosmology and approaches to religion; early Jewish and Christian engagement with wider philosophical and religious traditions, including in the thought of Philo of Alexandria; and the localized study of curse tablets, binding spells, and related rites.

Joseph Badawi-Crook took his doctorate from the Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, in 2025. He was supervised by Glenn Most, Christopher Minkowski, and Luigi Battezzato. Previously he studied Classics at Oxford University and Comparative Literature at UCL. He spent two summers studying Sanskrit at the École Française d’Extrême-Orient in Pondicherry, India. He publishes and lectures on comparison of Ancient Greek Literature of all kinds, whether genealogical (Sanskrit), areal (Near-Eastern), or typological (global mythology), in the conviction that all three are necessary to understand a culture’s quiddity. At the CHS, he will continue writing a monograph based on his doctoral work. The latter advocates a new kind of Greek-Sanskrit
comparison, then sets those methods to work on the subject of divination in ancient Greek and Indian literature, with the aim of refining interpretation of Archaic Greek literature. He will also complete two articles: one defends his preferred methodology of comparison in general terms; the other defends the so-called ‘minimalist’ position on Ancient Greek / Near-Eastern diffusion.

Malina Buturović is an intellectual historian of the body in the Imperial, and occasionally Classical, Greek worlds. She works primarily on medical and scientific texts (especially Galen of Pergamon), but with an eye to establishing their entanglements with literature, philosophy and theology. Her current book project (The Transmission of Fault) reads across the corpora of Plutarch and Galen to chart a convergence between theologies of delayed divine punishment and the biology of heredity. Current article projects examine afterlife theology, the anthropology of kinship, and body and “heredity” in Greek tragedy.

She received her BA at Yale (2016) in Classics and PhD at Princeton (2023) in Classics and Interdisciplinary Humanities. In fall 2023, she returned to Yale as a postdoctoral fellow (AY 23–24) and is now Assistant Professor (Fall 24–) in the Department of Classics.

Edith Foster works on ancient Greek prose writers, primarily historiography. She published a monograph called Thucydides, Pericles, and Periclean Imperialism with Cambridge University Press in 2010 (pb. 2013), and has co-edited several volumes, including Thucydides and Herodotus, with Donald Lateiner, (OUP, 2012), and The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides (2017; pb. 2020). She is presently working on Books 4 and 5 of Thucydides and preparing a commentary on Book 4 of Thucydides for the Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics series.

Spring 2027 Fellows in Residence

Christina Filippaki specializes in Greek tragedy. She received her BA from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and her PhD from the University of Chicago. She continued teaching at UChicago as a Teaching Fellow in the Humanities, before holding a Senior Fellowship for Advanced Research in the Humanities at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens. Her broader interests include Greek poetry, modern Greek reception, and performance. Her work is published or forthcoming in the American Journal of Philology, The Classical Quarterly, Illinois Classical Studies, and the Classical Receptions Journal.

While at the Center for Hellenic Studies, she will be developing her first book, The Multiverse of Euripides’ Atreidai Plays. The monograph draws on narratology and theory of fiction in order to show that Euripides’ Electra, Helen, Iphigenia among the Taurians, Orestes, and Iphigenia in Aulis operate as a multiverse-like narrative system: a set of alternate and complementary narrative trajectories in which mutually exclusive versions of characters and events coexist. By treating the five plays as “yes, and” and “what if” scenarios of each other, the book offers new interpretations of all five tragedies and addresses long-standing questions concerning their genre, tragic identity, and relationship to past literary traditions.

Ben Folit-Weinberg is Associate Professor of Classics at Ohio State University. He is the author of Homer, Parmenides, and the Road to Demonstration (Cambridge University Press, 2022) and articles on early Greek aēr, the role of analogy in Parmenides, Sophocles and the ethics of the Anthropocene, as well as forthcoming work on the Presocratics and on metaphors of reception. At the Center for Hellenic Studies, he will be developing a second monograph that explores the ambivalent status of the hodos—“road,” “route,” “way,” or “journey” – in the early Greek imaginary.

Eduardo M. García-Molina is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He received his PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago in 2024. His primary research interests revolve around the administrative and legal histories of the Seleukid Empire and the broader Hellenistic world. These interests include Greek and Roman historiography on empires, the societal impact of military participation and administration, comparative empire studies, the materiality of epigraphy and numismatics, and Hellenistic law. He is particularly interested in reconstructing the material dimensions of institutions through records, seals, and archives and tracing how administrative media shaped the ways subject communities communicated and experienced empire.

During his residency at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Eduardo will be working on his book project, a revision of his doctoral thesis. Tentatively titled Empire by the Books: Documents, Archives, and Seals within the Seleukid Empire, the book will provide a narrative of empire centered on attempts at creating, co-opting, and changing information technologies and archives within the empire. Instead of questioning whether these documents rendered reality in its totality and advancing a maximalist claim, the project embraces the artificiality of administrative language to construct how the state envisioned its subjects and territories and how subjects navigated these categories and documents. Eduardo will also be working on a related project examining the concept of asebeia (“impiety”) within the Seleukid Empire as a rhetorical tool that allowed subjects to harmonize local religious practices with the overarching imperial structure, creating legal polyphony between the central administration and local communities and temples.

Bryant Kirkland is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on Greek literature of the Roman Empire. Across multiple journal articles and book chapters, he has written on concepts of authorship, intertextuality, and narrative. His first book, Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature: Criticism, Imitation, Reception (Oxford, 2022), read Herodotus as a “global writer” within the thought-worlds of Dionysius, Plutarch, Lucian, Dio Chrysostom, and Pausanias. The book was honored with the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies. At the Center for Hellenic Studies, he will pursue work on his second monograph, a literary study of the philosophically inflected orator Dio Chrysostom. This project takes up Dio as an “essaying” writer, examining the ways in which the unusual and often unpredictable form of Dio’s texts engages readers in a picaresque series of ethical reflections around ideas of movement, the environment, entropy, and art. 

Rachel H. Lesser is Associate Professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at Gettysburg College. She specializes in ancient Greek literature (particularly Homeric epic) and its reception, with a focus on gender and desire, and her philological analyses are informed by various kinds of critical theory. She earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in Classics, with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality, from the University of California, Berkeley, and she also holds a B.A. in Classics from Columbia University and a second B.A. in Classics and English from Magdalen College, Oxford University. Her first book is Desire in the Iliad: The Force That Moves the Epic and Its Audience (Oxford University Press, 2022), and she has also published articles and book chapters on the Odyssey, Sappho’s lyrics, and the reception of Homer. At the Center for Hellenic Studies, she will be working on a second book, Queer and Straight Trajectories in the Trojan War Epic Tradition, which draws on queer theories of temporality to analyze ancient Greek and Roman epics and contemporary Trojan War novels. 

Matteo Milesi specializes in the intellectual history and philosophy of the Imperial and Late Antique period, with a focus on the study of commentaries and interpretative practices within the Platonic tradition. He is currently Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds an MA in Philosophy (2021) and a PhD in Classical Studies (2023) from the University of Michigan. In addition, he earned an MA in Classics from the University of Durham (2015) and a BA in Classics from the Università degli Studi di Milano (2014). 

While at the CHS, Matteo will work on his first monograph, provisionally entitled Philology and Philosophy in Porphyry of Tyre, which is a revision of his doctoral dissertation. Most of Porphyry’s extant works consists of exegetical writings on a wide range of texts, from the Homeric poems to scientific and philosophical treatises. The monograph offers the first book-length systematic study of Porphyry as a reader and commentator, with the goal of reconstructing a set of coherent principles that guide his interpretive practices. It will bring to the fore the influence of Alexandrian philology on Porphyry’s exegetical activity, while at the same time showing how the philological method is transformed by Porphyry into a tool for training would-be philosophers in how to ascend to the first principles. By exploring the relationship between a disciplined engagement with texts and philosophical contemplation in the early Neoplatonic tradition, the book will contribute a new chapter to the history of reading. 

Najee Olya is an assistant professor of Classical Studies at William & Mary. He received his PhD in Mediterranean Art and Archaeology from the University of Virginia, an MA degree in Classics from the University of Arizona, and a double BA in Anthropology and Classical Civilization from the University of Illinois at Chicago. His current research focuses on the visual and material culture of ancient Greece as evidence of interconnectivity with the wider Mediterranean and beyond. In particular, he is interested in exchange and interaction between ancient Greece and Africa as a crucial catalyst for the fabrication of identity and otherness via artifacts and iconography made by Greek artists as early as the sixth century BCE. 

While in residence at the CHS, Najee will work on his first monograph, tentatively titled Envisioning Africa(ns) in Ancient Greek Art and Culture. The book will examine artifacts produced in a variety of media from the Archaic through Hellenistic periods that are visual portrayals of figures identified with locales in Africa including Libya, Egypt, and the lands further south known to ancient Greeks as Aithiopia. The central goal of the investigation is to re-contextualize these artifacts in their ancient settings of production and use while also interrogating the racialized modern afterlife of the objects from the nineteenth century to the present. 

Sailakshmi Ramgopal is Assistant Professor of History at Columbia University. She received her BA in Classics from Northwestern University and her PhD in Classics from the University of Chicago. Her research examines mobility, identity, violence, and citizenship in the Roman world. At CHS she will be completing her first monograph, tentatively titled Romans Abroad: Identity, Place, and Empire. The book traces how Romans in Asia Minor, mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, Sicily, North Africa, and Iberia in the age of the Republic used forms of collective action to advance their economic and political interests in the provinces and at Rome, and how in doing so they shaped the institution of Roman citizenship and provincial administration. Her research has received support from the American Academy in Rome and the American Philosophical Society. In addition to being a Roman historian, Lakshmi is a practicing multidisciplinary artist.