The Francis Jones Graduate Assistantship Program is a newly created program aiming to support the study of the humanities and social sciences and to encourage service-based learning for pre-doctoral researchers who plan to pursue careers both within academia and beyond the academy. For the May/June 2021 session, four Harvard graduate students have been awarded graduate assistantships and will be working with the New Alexandria Commentary Platform, which facilitates the creation of digital editions, translations, and commentaries.
Spring 2021 Francis Jones Graduate Assistants
Francesca Bellei
Francesca Bellei is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She holds an MLitt in Creative Writing from the University of St Andrews (2016) and a BA in Classics from the University of Cambridge (2014). She works primarily on Latin, Ancient Greek, Italian, and Anglophone texts. She is currently writing a dissertation on the uses of mothering and nursing as metaphors in dynamics of identity construction and cultural hegemony. Recent publications include ‘Border Queers: Writing the Gender of Boundaries’ in Romance Sphere (2018), ‘Bilingual Mistranslations’ in Comparative Literature Studies (2020). She has a forthcoming chapter in the edited volume Unspoken Rome: Absence in Latin Literature and its Reception (CUP), entitled ‘Omnibus umbra locis adero: Elena Ferrante and the Poetics of Absence.’ She will be working on the New Alexandria Commentary, focusing on issues of race and gender in Virgil’s Moretum.
Greta Galeotti
Greta Galeotti grew up in Milan and Venice. She received her BA in Classical Literature from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2017), where in her last year she participated in the European “Erasmus” and attended as an exchange student the Institute of Archaeology of the University College of London. She received her MPhil in General Linguistics and Comparative Philology (2019) from the University of Oxford, where she focused on Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit. She is currently pursuing her Ph.D. in Classical Philology in the Classics department of Harvard University. Her main interest today is in Ancient Greek dialects, their classification and the sociolinguistic contexts of their use in inscriptions and literary texts, alongside archaic Greek poetry, Indo-Iranian, and historical linguistics.
Paul Johnston
Paul Johnston is a PhD candidate at Harvard University in Classical Philology with a secondary field in Comparative Literature. He is writing a dissertation that explores the Greek and Latin literatures of the Roman empire, the bilingual cultural contexts that these two linguistic traditions emerged from, and their shared implication in Rome’s imperial project. He has also published articles on Greek drama. He holds degrees from the University of Auckland and Harvard University, and has taught courses on literature, art and culture as well as the Greek and Latin languages at both institutions. He has also worked as a curatorial intern at the Harvard Art Museums and the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata.
Yingxue Wang
Yingxue Wang is currently a PhD student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University. Her research investigates the transmission of aromatic substances in the interconnected world of the early medieval period (3rd–8th centuries) and the new forms of religious, cultural, and medical practices enabled by the arrival of novel scents. Given the cross-cultural nature of her research interest, Yingxue has been pursuing dual specialty in Medieval Studies and East Asian Studies, as well as developing comparative projects on the olfactory cultures in early Christianity and Buddhism. She is interested in contributing to the ongoing conversation on the Global Medieval Ages and exploring broader issues such as sensory perception and the body, long-distance exchange, and global connectivity. Before her PhD, Yingxue completed her BA in Art History at Yale University, after which she studied at Harvard for her MA in Regional Studies: East Asia.