The CHS supports postdoctoral researchers with a variety of configurations. Fellows receive varying levels of support and may reside at the Center in Washington, DC for up to 18 weeks, depending on the scope of their proposed project. For information about CHS fellows based in Greece, see the CHS Greece website.
CHS Summer 2024 Residential Postdoctoral Fellows in Hellenic Studies
Antiopi Argyriou has been a Classics Teacher at the Greek State Secondary Education since 2001. She currently is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has pursued postgraduate studies in the UK (PhD in Classics, Royal Holloway University of London; Supervisor: Prof. Lene Rubinstein. Dissertation title: ‘The concept of arete in Hellenistic honorific decrees’; MPhil in Classics University of Cambridge (Clare College); Supervisor: Prof. Paul Cartledge) and in Greece (MA in Ancient Greek History, Department of History & Archaeology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens; Supervisors: Prof. Emm. Microyiannakis, Prof. Kostas Buraselis). She holds a BA (Greek Ptychion) in History and Archaeology (field of specialization: History) from the Department of History & Archaeology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
Her research interests lie in the areas of ancient history, Greek epigraphy, Hellenistic poetry, Greek epigrams (inscribed and literary), oratory and historiography, and in the rhetoric of ancient values.
She has participated in several international seminars and academic conferences, and has published articles and papers in journals and collective volumes. She is also engaged in training programs and lectures for secondary teachers about the teaching of ancient history at schools. https://cambridge.academia.edu/ANTIOPIARGYRIOUCASMERIDIS
At the CHS, Antiopi will work on her project “The discourse of aretē: Spoken words, written texts, and public images in the Hellenistic and early Roman Imperial periods”. The project will investigate the interconnection between oratory, inscriptions and portrait sculpture about civic benefactors as honorands in the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, in order to ask how far the available evidence allows us to trace and highlight aspects of the ways in which their audiences reacted and received the discourse of virtue, as represented in different media. It aims to illuminate the extent to which the rhetoric of praise and vocabulary of virtue, as it is manifested in public oratory and rhetorical treatises, influenced the language of honorific decrees inscribed on durable material, as well as the visual representation of the honorands’ virtues in portrait sculpture. The overall aim of the project is to identify areas of continuity and change from the late fourth century BC to the second century AD in the ways of representing who is worthy of public praise and for what reasons.
The rhetoric of praise in Greek culture and the institution of euergetism in the Hellenistic and the Roman Imperial periods, attested in an abundance of honorific inscriptions and honorific portraits, have attracted much scholarly attention. In this civic discourse, the role of epideictic oratory is significant, mainly in the formulation of proposals in the Assembly for the award of public honours. Thus, the combination of spoken words, inscribed texts, and public images constitutes the complex dynamics of a discourse of arete. Each of these three aspects of honorific culture has been examined separately, but less attention has been devoted to their interplay and interconnection. This is the gap that this project aims to fill in.
Ekaterina But is a classical philologist and cultural historian. She holds a B.A. in Philology and Education from the Russian State University for the Humanities and a Ph.D. in Classics from The Ohio State University. Currently, she serves as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Classics at The Ohio State University. Ekaterina’s research interests include Archaic Greek and Hellenistic poetry, as well as Reception studies, particularly Classical receptions in Russia and the Soviet Union. In her research, Ekaterina focuses on the Classical receptions both within and outside antiquity, as well as on cultural products that include elements of popular imagination. She investigates how these cultural products reflect issues related to freedom and subordination within political systems where the cultural sphere is under state hegemony. Ekaterina’s recent publications include studies of the reception of Archaic Greek poetry and New Comedy in Hellenistic iambos, and the reception of ancient Greek myth in 20th-century Russia.
Ekaterina’s new project, titled Fabula Technologiae: Antiquity in Soviet Animation of the Era of Stagnation, investigates the “story of technology” manifested in Soviet animation through the reception of ancient Greece and Rome. This project marks the first comprehensive study of Classical reception in Soviet animation. For this project, Ekaterina proposed a hypothesis that the story of technology depicted in these animated adaptations serves a dual function. It reflects the official ideology celebrating the innovations of the socialist state, while also warning the audience about the potential dangers of technological progress within the context of the unstable peace of the Cold War Détente. With her analysis, Ekaterina also aims to demonstrate that by representing ancient innovators and intellectuals in opposition to those in power, the creators of these animation films express their solidarity with scholars and scientists who were repressed by the Soviet Union.
During her time as a CHS fellow, Ekaterina will be working on the chapter of this project dedicated to the adaptation of ancient Greek heroic narratives, such as the stories about Heracles, Prometheus, Perseus, and Jason, in the Soviet animated series of the 1970s. In this chapter, entitled “Promethean Fire and Greek Myth on the Soviet Screen,” Ekaterina studies the animated series The Legends and Myths of Ancient Greece (1969–1974), produced by director Alexandra Snezhko-Blotskaya. This chapter aims to examine the images related to technology and innovation as a mediator of the relationships between mortals and gods. The chapter will explore how these images, introduced by mythical narratives, signify a challenge to the “old” world order built on strict hierarchy and oppression.
Kathryn Caliva is an Assistant Professor of History and Classical Studies at St. Bonaventure University. She holds a Ph.D. in Classics from The Ohio State University, an M.A. in Classical Studies from Indiana University, and a B.A. in Humanities from Providence College. Her research focuses on Greek poetry and ancient religions, and she has additional interest in epigraphy, speech act theory, and the female voice in literature. Her published work has examined the narrative structure of the Getty Hexameters, the pragmatic eIect of mythic references in Sappho, and the motives behind divine lies in the Homeric Hymns.
At the CHS, Caliva will be working on a monograph that examines how poetic speakers in Greek lyric poetry use a close relationship with divinity, evidenced through prayers and mythic knowledge, as emblems of their authority. This book develops a theoretical model that combines speech act theory and rhetorical poetics and uses it to examine the work of four lyric poets – Sappho, Alcaeus, Pindar, and Bacchylides. It argues that poetic speakers within these corpora generate authority for their speech acts by demonstrating their knowledge of mythic narratives, their facility in interpreting those narratives, and their ability to communicate eIicaciously with gods. This demonstration of religious and cultural knowledge allows speakers to present themselves as competent and authoritative to the audiences over whose emotions and behaviors they seek to exert influence.
Benjamin Haller is Associate Professor of Classics at Virginia Wesleyan University, where he has taught as a one-person classics department since arriving in 2008. He has published on Homer, Lucian, Euripides, the Greek and Roman worlds in popular culture, and the receptions of Greek and Roman culture, including a book-length treatment of the role of classical literature in the culture of Virginia’s Tidewater region during the colonial period. He is currently working on projects on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Latin Pedagogy (a textbook titled Laetabere!), and Ralph Ellison.
His book project examines the relatively neglected role of the Ionian three-day festival of the Apatouria as a venue for the performance of poetry (see however Tsagalis 2018), and offers evidence for the fingerprint of such performances in the extant Homeric corpus, most especially in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes (Hymn 4). Across the past decades, the work of Kamen 2007, Lambert 1993, Hamilton 1984, Vidal-Naquet 1981, and others has set out a range of interpretations of the Apatouria as an Ionian ritual of incorporation. At the same time, there is ample attestation for a second function of the Apatouria in Athenian society: that of venue for poetic performance (Plato Timaeus 21B-C1; similarly the Herodotean Life of Homer presents Homer providing poetic accompaniment for the kindling of the fire at an Apatouria festival on Samos). Relatively little has been published upon this second function of the Apatouria, and on how performance at a rite of incorporation into the phratry may have impacted the narrative and structure of the poems there performed. Building on the connection posited by Brown (1947), followed by Johnston and Mulroy (2009), between Hymn 4 and the foundation of the altar of the twelve gods in the Agora by the Peisistratidae, Ben’s project investigates how the Homeric Hymn to Hermes evokes the Apatouria in order to further Peisistratid political aims, and how this reconstruction of the poem’s performance history can help to shed light on the manner in which the public spaces of Archaic Athens functioned as performance venues.
Michael McGlin is a Greek historian, he received his Ph.D. in Classics from the State University of New York at Buffalo (2019) and since that time, has taught as an Instructional Assistant Professor of Classics at Temple University. This fall, he is joining Brandeis University as an assistant professor in the department of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies.
His research centers on the intersection of the ancient Greek economy and religion. His current book project investigates the body of loans extended by the sanctuary of Apollo at Delos to the city-state of Delos and to individuals during the period of the island’s independence (341-167 BCE). He also is a member of the Working Group on Athenian Hegemony and co-edited (along with Aaron Hershkowitz) an issue of CHS’ journal Classics@23 The Athenian Empire Anew: Acting Hegemonically, Reacting Locally in the Athenian Arkhē (2023) and contributed a chapter therein on loans from local Attic temples to Athens during the Peloponnesian War.
Rebecca Worsham is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures at Smith College, where she specializes in the archaeology of the Greek Bronze Age. Her primary area of research is the domestic architecture of the Middle Bronze Age Greek mainland, and she co-directs fieldwork at the early Mycenaean site of Malthi in southwestern Greece with Michael Lindblom of Uppsala University. At the Center for Hellenic Studies, she is working on a book project regarding the social practices surrounding the construction (and reconstruction) of houses in Middle Helladic Greece, focusing on the ways in which this architecture is marshalled to create ancestral spaces.