Current Residential Fellows

Tejas S. Aralere (pronounced Tay-Jus Are-uh-Larry) is an assistant professor of Classics and Humanities at the University of New Hampshire. He earned his PhD in Classics from UC Santa Barbara in 2023 while also studying Sanskrit with UCSB’s Religious Studies department. He also holds a BA in Latin and a BS in Neuroscience from the College of William and Mary. His broader research interests are in the humanistic history of science, with his current research and pedagogy rooted in the history of scientific exchange between the ancient Mediterranean and South Asia. You can read more about his research here.

While at the CHS, Tejas will continue working on the final part of transforming his dissertation into his first monograph, Cosmic Embodiment: Astrological Melothesia in the Ancient Mediterranean and India. This book offers a transdisciplinary analysis of Manilius’ Astronomica (1^st-cent. CE) alongside the Yavana Jātaka, a 2^nd-cent. CE Sanskrit astrological treatise often translated as the “Greek Horoscopy” because it appears to be the earliest source translating the Greco-Babylonian zodiac into Sanskrit. Research on Hellenistic legacies in India has long focused on Gandhāra after Alexander’s failed conquest, portraying the Indo-Greeks, called Yavanas in Sanskrit, as the product of Indian–Greek intermarriage. Tejas re-examines this narrative by placing the Yavana within the complex socio-political history of Northern and Northwestern India between the 2^nd-cent. BCE and the 3^rd-cent. CE, emphasizing the often-overlooked significance of the Yuezhi nomadic peoples who migrated south from the Eurasian steppe, conquered Bactria, and forged a new identity as the Kuṣāṇas with an academic center in Taxila. Tejas is grateful for the opportunity to be a CHS Fellow and looks forward to collaborating with other fellows this Fall!

Ifigeneia Giannadaki is Associate Professor of Classics and the Cassas Chair in Greek Studies at the University of Florida. She studied with Chris Carey at University College London and was specialized in ancient Greek law and Attic oratory. Her research interests lie in ancient Greek law, Athenian legal and socio-political history, citizenship and immigration, and politics.  She is the author of A Commentary on Demosthenes, Against Androtion (2020, Oxford University Press) and co-editor of a collective volume on Use and Abuse of Law in the Athenian Courts (2018, Brill). Ifigeneia has also published several studies on Athenian law and oratory, legal procedure, and she is currently working on a monograph on metics in Athens.

Katherine B. Harrington is an archaeologist and social historian. For the last two years, she was a AAAS Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the U.S. National Science Foundation, and she will be starting a faculty position at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in January 2026. She has a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University and an AB in Classical Archaeology from Dartmouth College. Her work focuses broadly on the archaeology of everyday life in the Archaic through Hellenistic periods with a special focus on the domestic lives of craftspeople. She has been a field archaeologist in Greece for 20 years and currently serves as the Assistant Director of the Lechaion Harbor and Settlement Land Project near Corinth. 

At the CHS, she is working on a new project focusing on women’s work that argues for a reconceptualization of the Greek economy between 750 and 250 BCE to include both paid and unpaid labor. Ancient Greek women contributed economically in myriad and flexible ways, including childcare, textile production, food preparation, retail, and entertainment. Though this labor has traditionally been treated as economically unimportant, it was foundational to the functioning of the Greek economy and can be traced through both text and material evidence of gendered tasks like weaving, infant care, and grain grinding.

Estella Kessler specializes in Hellenistic literature, particularly the remains of the scientific scholarship conducted by the Hellenistic poets in Alexandria. She received her BA, MSt, and PhD in Classics from the University of Oxford, where she studied at Brasenose College. Afterwards she moved to New College to teach on the Greek and Latin epic, tragedy, and Hellenistic poetry as a Stipendiary Lecturer. She has just finished her monograph -based on her PhD thesis- on Callimachus’ paradoxographical fragments expanded with a critical edition, translation, and commentary and an article on Vergil’s engagement with his Greek sources. She also has been involved in the identification of three Late Antique homilies and martyrdoms in the West Aramaic transmission on the basis of the Greek text. At the Center for Hellenic Studies, she will study the occurrences of birds and particularly ornithomancy in Hellenistic times. Birds play a variety of roles in Hellenistic literature, but evidence particularly for ornithomancy is surprisingly hard to come by in this period: hence, her research will explore the presence of birds also in the arts, historiography, and epigraphic sources to reach a complete picture of the period. An important role also plays the Egyptian environment in which the Alexandrian poets were operating. This work will lay the groundwork for a monograph on this topic. 

Manuela Marai specializes in ancient medicine. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of Warwick in 2024 and holds a BA and an MA in Classics from the University of Verona and Padova, along with a BSc and an MSc in Molecular Biology from the University of Padova. She collaborates with classicists, biologists, and chemists to decipher ancient pharmacological theories and practices, exemplifying a truly interdisciplinary endeavour that bridges the humanities with the sciences.

At the Center for Hellenic Studies, Manuela will work on her book project, which is a revision of her PhD dissertation concerning wound healing treatment in the works of the Greek physician Galen of Pergamon. The monograph will rely on Galen’s work De compositione medicamentorum per genera, a major yet understudied treatise on plaster formulations, while drawing upon the rest of Galen’s production to reconstruct the whole medical issue of wound aetiology and healing from physiology and pathology to therapy. The emphasis will be on the technical aspects of ancient pharmacology and pharmaceutics—which substances were combined, how, and why. This study will greatly enhance the scientific understanding of Galen, his medicine, and the rationale of pharmacology and pharmaceutics in the context of ancient medical practice, while also shedding light on the ancient use of antimicrobial substances and suggesting new lead compounds in drug discovery.

Justine McConnell is Reader in Comparative Literature and Classical Reception at King’s College London. Her project at the Center for Hellenic Studies focuses on the ways in which the women of the Harlem Renaissance engaged with Graeco-Roman antiquity in their work. Writers including Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen and Jessie Redmon Fauset interwove myths and literature from ancient Greece and Rome into their modern narratives, and in doing so, entwined past and present, Europe, Africa, and the Americas, to create works of transnational and transhistorical scope that radically re-envisioned the ancient Mediterranean, contesting its long-standing appropriation by dominant powers. The writings of these women imagine alternative futures and destabilize the structures of coloniality that contribute to uneven and inequitable societies. Yet unlike the male writers of the Harlem Renaissance, these women’s dialogues with the ancient Mediterranean tended to render them doubly invisible: not only as women writers in a predominantly male environment, but as Black women engaging with an ancient culture that continued to be primarily associated with whiteness. 

James Calvin Taylor is Assistant Professor of Classics at Colby College, where he also teaches courses in the Environmental Humanities. He received his PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard in 2020 with a dissertation on the conceptualization of deep time, geological processes, and environmental change in classical texts. His research interests span a wide variety of genres and time periods in classical antiquity, embracing texts as diverse as Aristotle’s Meteorologica and Ovid’s Metamorphoses,and drawing upon interpretative frameworks from the history of science, environmental criticism, and the philosophy of history. He has written articles on topics as diverse as Lucan’s description of the Syrtes, Herodotus’ integration of Egypt’s geological and human histories, and the significance of tides in Stoic meteorology. 

During his residency at the Center for Hellenic Studies, he will be completing a monograph tentatively titled Time’s Abyss: Geological Processes and Deep Time in Ancient Greek Prose. This book investigates how the observation of geological processes led ancient Greek philosophers and historians to imagine much deeper timescales than those made possible by the shallow reach of recorded history and collective memory.

Paul Touyz is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Kansas. He completed a BA in Classics and German at the University of Sydney before receiving a PhD in Classics from Princeton University in 2018. He works broadly on Greek literature, cultural history, and reception, with publications on the reception of Aristophanes in Enlightenment Germany, as well as on Aeschylus and Hellenistic satyr play.

While at the CHS, Paul will be at work on a book project – a revision of his PhD dissertation investigating the development and reception of satyr play beyond classical Athens. The book will look afresh at the full range of evidence for the production and performance of satyr play throughout antiquity to reconstruct the history of satyr play after its removal from the tragic tetralogy and explore how satyr play was conceptualized as an independent dramatic genre in ancient poetics and criticism. Aside from offering new interpretations of the fragments of satyr play and epigraphic records of postclassical performances, the project will also explore the place of satyr play in the works of authors including Plato, Horace, and Julian the Apostate.

Georgios Tsolakis is a social and cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean with strong interests in epigraphy and digital humanities. He earned his PhD at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, after BA and MA studies at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is currently participating in the Lyktos Archaeological Project (Greece) and working on the edition of several epigraphic texts that illuminate the political, social, and economic life of the Cretan city of Lyktos. He co-authored the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. Consolidated Concordances for Volumes XLVI – LX (1996 – 2010) (Leiden/Boston 2021), a guide to the inscriptions published, mentioned, or discussed in the respective volumes of SEG. Since September 2022, he has been project manager of Roman Statutes: Renewing Roman Law, a collaborative project on all epigraphically preserved Roman laws.

At the Center for Hellenic Studies, Georgios will transform his dissertation (Ancestors and Family Traditions in the Hellenistic and Imperial Polis) into a monograph. The book asks how, when, and why Greeks invoked their ancestors, and with what legal, social, economic, and political effects. It defines “family tradition” as the intergenerational transmission of identities, values, and obligations—conceptually informed by Bourdieu’s notion of habitus—and maps the dynamic between households and the public sphere. Drawing on epigraphic, literary, and archaeological evidence, the project reframes how civic memory formed and how political culture operated, bridging epigraphic microhistory with broader historical narratives.

Tim Whitmarsh FBA is Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Trinity College. He is the author of numerous books on ancient Greece, including Battling the Gods: Atheism in the Ancient World (2015), Dirty Love: The Genealogy of the Ancient Greek Novel (2018) and Rome’s Age of Revolution: Christians in a Classical World (2026).

Johannes Wietzke completed his PhD in Classics at Stanford University and has taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Carleton College, and Trinity University. His research interests lie at the intersection of Greek literary culture and the history of science, and recent publications include articles on the textual traditions of Greek mathematics, astronomy, and geography. While at the CHS he will be working on a book that argues for the cultural contingency of form in Greek scientific texts. Through a series of case studies ranging from the fifth century BCE to the second century CE, the book explores how cultural aesthetics shaped how ancient scientific authorities used (or didn’t use) visual media like maps and diagrams to make claims about the world and nature. It thus demonstrates that the media through which ideas were conveyed were not inert forms, but themselves added charge to the atmosphere of wonder and debate.