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.
2024 Fall Residential Fellows in Hellenic Studies
Jacqueline Arthur-Montagne is the John L. Nau Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Virginia. Her work to date has focused on Imperial Greek literature and education, and she has published several articles and volumes on the ancient novel, literary criticism, and Roman rhetoric. Her first book project has reexamined ancient literary education as an Education in Fiction, which established the formal conventions of reading and writing fiction in the Roman world and sparked new genres of Imperial prose fiction. While at the Center for Hellenic Studies, Jacqueline is beginning the early-stage research for a new project on The Classical Past in the Ancient Classroom. Undertaking a comprehensive reassessment of the historical content in all extant school papyri, rhetorical exercises, and teaching handbooks from postclassical antiquity, Jacqueline aims to uncover what ancient students about the history of Classical Greece and especially Athenian democracy in the centuries following their decline.
Andrés Carrete is a Postdoctoral Fellow for Harvard’s Department of the Classics and the Center for Hellenic Studies. As part of his appointment, he is the academic program director for Harvard University’s “Scholars in Training” summer program – an initiative aiming to enhance and implement inclusive pedagogy for increased access and diversity in Classics.
Andrés holds a PhD and an MA in Classics from the University of California Santa Barbara as well as BA degrees in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Texas at El Paso. Before his appointment at the CHS, he was an early career postdoctoral fellow at the University of Texas at Austin.
Andrés’ research interests include the Latin American reception of classics (especially Mexican reception), Greek tragedy, inclusive pedagogy, translation theory, ethics, and political philosophy. At the CHS, Andrés is working to complete his first monograph project. Said project examines the practice of adapting Sophocles’ Antigone in Mexico by utilizing concepts of heritage, monumentality, and philosophical conventions alongside scholarship of race, gender, and ethnicity.
Dr. Tom Clements is a Greek historian specializing in the social, economic and political history of Archaic and Classical Greece, with a particular interest in Sparta and the Peloponnese. He holds a BA in History (Hons) from the University of Lancaster (2013-16), and an MA and PhD in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Manchester (2016-22), where he has also held the position of Lecturer in Greek History (2022-24) and remains an Honorary Research Fellow. For the 2024/25 academic year, in addition to his time at the Center, in the Spring he will hold a Margo Tytus Visiting Fellowship at the University of Cincinnati. While Sparta currently occupies much of his time, he also has strong research interests in ancient state formation (broadly defined), Greek epigraphy (Archaic to Roman), and Greek historiography (especially Herodotus and Thucydides).
During his time at the CHS, Dr Clements will be working on a monograph on territory and territoriality in ancient Sparta, focusing especially on the period from c.800 to 371 BC, tracing the rise of Spartan power in the eighth century to its only partial collapse at the beginning of the fourth century after the Theban defeat at Leuktra. Sparta was in fact a complex macro-regional entity which purported to control a territory which extended over the entirety of the southern Peloponnese and which stood at around 8000 sq. km, including Lakonia, Messenia, and portions of both southern Arkadia and Elis. The city was therefore one city within a much larger political and geographical space. His book aims to reconstruct and analyze the means by which Sparta and the Spartiates (the full citizens of Sparta who monopolized its political institutions) maintained their influence over this vast area. He is particularly interested in exploring the limits of Spartan power, whether that is in the inherent coercive and governmental limitations of ancient polities or the cultural limitations on Spartiate influence within the southern Peloponnese. The book is therefore intended as both a history of Spartan failure as well as a history of Spartan power. The portion of this work completed at the CHS will focus on ancient territorial myths relating to Sparta and the structure of rural landscapes in the regions Sparta purported to control.
Mary Hamil Gilbert is an Assistant Professor of Classics and Affiliate faculty of Gender Studies at Mississippi State University. Her current and future projects span Greek and Roman tragedy and ancient women authors (like Sappho, Anyte of Tegea and Vibia Perpetua). They build on the work of other socially-conscious interpreters to shift our ideas about who and what matters in the study of the ancient world. Her way into these texts is connected to major contemporary concerns – gender, class, race, the environment, and the way these cultural concepts get shaped by structures of power. She is equally interested in the long and tangled reception of these authors and concepts, especially in early modern France. She has co-edited a volume entitled Believing Ancient Women: Feminist Epistemologies for Greece and Rome (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) and has written articles and chapters on Aeschylus, Euripides, Seneca, Sappho, Anyte of Tegea, and early modern French tragedian Jean Racine.
At the Center for Hellenic Studies, her project is a co-authored book with Edith Gwendolyn Nally entitled ‘She is My City’: Hecuba and the Politics of Care in Greek Tragedy. The book has two goals: first, to reinterpret ancient characterizations of Hecuba as both caring mother and relentless justice seeker, and, second, to demonstrate how recent care ethical views might be developed into a text critical lens through which to interpret classical sources more broadly. It also offers clear implications for our contemporary cultural moment. With maternal mental illnesses on the rise, exacerbated by war, global disasters, chronic stress, financial burdens, violence, and gender and racial oppression, it’s hard for many women to think of motherhood as anything but a threat to their autonomy. For Hecuba, however, motherhood is a wellspring of political, ethical, and intellectual insight.
Simone Mucci obtained a PhD in Classics and Ancient History from the University of Warwick, UK (2023), a Master’s degree in Classics from Sapienza – University of Rome, Italy (2016) and a Bachelor’s degree in Classics from Sapienza (2013). He studied Greek Palaeography at the Vatican Archive (2016-17) and was Academic Visitor at the Institute of Classical Studies, University of London, UK (2017-18).
His main research interests are: textual criticism and history of the manuscript transmission of Greek and Latin works; Galenic pharmacology; Greek palaeography; Greek linguistics; Greek prose.
At the CHS, he will complete the critical edition of the first book of Galen’s work On Antidotes. The treatise has never received a modern edition, that requires inter alia a substantial amount of new work on the manuscripts of both books of On Antidotes. The Greek text will be provided with an English translation and a detailed philological commentary. In addition, Simone will explore the connections between luxury drugs in ancient times and the conspicuous consumption of goods theorized by Thorstein Veblen in the work The Theory of the Leisure Class.
Arjan Nijk is a postdoctoral researcher in Greek linguistics at the University of Amsterdam. He holds BA and MA degrees from Leiden University and a PhD degree from the Free University in Amsterdam. In 2022 his monograph Tense-Switching in Classical Greek: A Cognitive Approach appeared with Cambridge University Press. His current project in Amsterdam, The Linguistics of Engagement, focuses on address in Athenian oratory. Other publications by Arjan have treated tense and aspect, iconicity, and rhetorical theory. At the Center for Hellenic Studies Arjan will be working on ‘musical’ patterns in Homeric verse, that is, the iconic use of phonemes, meter and accent.
Dr. Enrico Piergiacomi is assistant professor in history of philosophy at the Technion | Israel Institute of Technology and research fellow at the Bruno Kessler Foundation of Trento. He was recipient of the international grant The Reception of Lucretius and Roman Epicureanism from the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth century (2019-2020), research in residence at the Bogliasco Foundation of Genova (2021), fellow at Villa I Tatti | The Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies (2021-2022), and postdoctoral fellow in the research group Religion and Urbanity: Reciprocal Formations at the Max-Weber-Kolleg of Erfurt (2022). He specializes in ancient/modern philosophy and its intersections with science, theology, and ethics. He published three books: Storia delle antiche teologie atomiste (Rome 2017); Amicus Lucretius. Gassendi, il “De rerum natura” e l’edonismo cristiano (Berlin-New York 2022); and Gli esercizi di Epicuro. Discipline per il piacere (Pisa 2024).
With the support of CHS, Dr. Piergiacomi will undertake a project that is part of the broader research initiative of the Digital Atomism group, supported by the Technion. Digital Atomism aims to digitalise sources related to the ancient atomists (especially Leucippus, Democritus, and their followers, as well as the “minor” Epicureans), while also analysing the latter’s theories and reconstructing their impact, particularly in relation to early modern philosophy of science and ethics. More precisely, Dr. Piergiacomi will focus on the research package Women in Ancient Atomism: Physiology, Epistemology, and Gender Ethics.
This sub-project represents a systematic attempt to reconstruct both the conceptions of women in the ancient atomists and the ideas of female Epicurean philosophers, particularly the courtesan Leontion and the Roman empress Plotina. From a historical perspective, the aim is to trace the evolution of the atomistic views of female nature. It will be shown that Democritus’ misogynistic views were not shared by Epicurus and the early Epicureans, who held a more favourable stance on women’s participation in philosophy and argued for cognitive equality with men. This positive recognition diminishes within Roman Epicureanism, as Lucretius and Philodemus asserted that women remain inferior to men, despite the former’s in-depth study of female physiology and the latter’s acknowledgement of women as significant contributors to household management. Philosophically, the project delves into three distinct yet interconnected areas: (1) physics, involving the atomists’ examination of female anatomy and physiology; (2) epistemology, specifically the arguments both for and against women’s intellectual abilities, alongside an analysis of the philosophical discoveries and arguments of female Epicureans; (3) ethics, as the atomistic discourse on women aims to define the ideal and happiest male-female relationship. In addition to its primary focus, the project will explore how these conceptions influenced the ideas of key Renaissance and early modern thinkers, such as Lorenzo Valla and Pierre Gassendi, who championed intellectual equality between men and women
Stephen Sansom is a Hellenist specializing in early Greek poetry and its reception, especially epic, aesthetics, and digital humanities. He received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University in 2018 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University before joining the Department of Classics at Florida State University. His project at the CHS, “Patterns of Expectancy in Greek Epic: Between Computation and Close Reading,” focuses on the expectations generated by the metrical position of words over the thousand-year history of Greek hexameter poetry (8th c. BCE to 5th c. CE).
Lea Aurelia Schroeder specializes in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy & Classics from Yale University in 2022 and has since been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Purdue University. Her current research focuses primarily on ancient Greek philosophical psychology, especially perception and its relation to cognition, mostly in the works of Plato. Her further interests include topics at the intersection of metaphysics and ancient Greek science. She has published or forthcoming articles on these topics in Phronesis, Apeiron, and Journal of the History of Philosophy.
At the Center for Hellenic Studies, she will work on her monograph project Plato on Perception, which develops a novel and integrated account of Plato’s conception of perception as a psycho-physical process in his so-called later dialogues (focusing on the Timaeus, Theaetetus, and Philebus). This account situates a unified interpretation of the physics and physiology of sense perception within the framework of Plato’s broader psychological economy, especially the relation of perception to kinds of cognition (including judgment, memory, imagination, and knowledge) and its role in practical deliberation and action.
Sebastian Zerhoch received his PhD in Greek Philology from Freie Universität Berlin. His dissertation on the Erinyes was published as a monograph under the title Erinys in Epos, Tragödie und Kult: Fluchbegriff und personale Fluchmacht. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Religious Studies at Freie Universität Berlin, working on ancient Greek religion, literature and inscriptions. He is preparing a monograph on the ritual of libation, on which he has also published several articles. During his residency at the Center for Hellenic Studies, he will investigate the so-called Marmarini inscription, an extraordinary set of cult regulations from Hellenistic Thessaly that contains a unique mixture of Greek and Near Eastern religious and linguistic features. Though the research of this inscription has made remarkable progress since its first publication in 2015, there are still numerous open questions as to its religious diversity and cross-cultural background. The project focuses on the analysis of a difficult section concerning rules for taking oaths and on the question of the configuration of the mixed pantheon in the sanctuary described in the inscription.