News - Archive

Princeton Classics is delighted to welcome Dr. Jacob Murel to the team of the Logion Project, a natural language processing tool aiding in the restoration of premodern Greek texts. The first Research Software Engineer hired by an East Pyne language department, Dr. Murel will work to make Logion more accessible to philologists while improving and diversifying its performance.

We are delighted to welcome author, critic, classicist, and translator Daniel Mendelsohn (*89, *94) back to campus as Princeton’s 2024–2025 Robert Fagles Lecturer for Classics in the Contemporary Arts. One of the nation's premier public intellectuals, Mendelsohn serves as Editor-at-Large of the New York Review of Books and Director of the Robert B. Silvers Foundation, a charitable trust promoting nonfiction writers, and teaches literature at Bard College. Scheduled for September 17, Mendelsohn’s lecture is titled “What’s the Ancient Greek for ‘Picnic’?: Adventures in Translating the Odyssey.” 

In a major initiative to continue expanding interdisciplinary ties on campus, the Department of Classics has announced new affiliations with ten professors and researchers across the university. Drawn from departments as wide-ranging as Music, Near Eastern Studies and Computer Science, these new members round out a complement of twenty-three affiliates representing eleven academic departments, as well as the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies and the Princeton University Library and Art Museum.

Classics graduate student Sherry (Chiayi) Lee began teaching spoken Ancient Greek at the Princeton Athens Center in 2022. The latest session of this innovative, immersive class was held from July 3-31. The class met for in-depth study at the Princeton Athens Center and took excursions to museums and archeological sites in Athens. Here, Lee and her students Antonio Kerstenetzky (Philosophy) and Grace Monk (Comparative Literature) share reflections on the class.

Students often learn that the Chorus comments on the action of a Greek drama. But few ask how it actually influences the play. Enter prospective classics major Steven Feng ’27, who explored this question at the DH for Hellenic Studies Summer Institute at the Princeton Athens Center.

The Department of Classics at Princeton University announces a tenure-track or tenured position at the rank of Assistant, Associate, or Full Professor in Ancient Greek History, starting in Fall 2025. Applications are welcome from candidates in any area of research related to the ancient Greek world from approximately 1200 BCE to 300 CE.

The 2024 Princeton Department of Classics Newsletter has arrived, now available online and in print!

Inside, you can find exciting updates from faculty and students, as well as articles highlighting Classics Department events!

Princeton Classics is delighted to congratulate department graduate alum Marco Santini *21 on his appointment as Lecturer in Ancient History in the Classics Department of the University of Edinburgh. “I will be thinking back of my Princeton years with gratitude to my teachers and friends!” says Santini.

Princeton Classics is thrilled to congratulate graduate student Sherry Lee on being appointed Assistant Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “Being at Princeton and experiencing Classics in such a unique intellectual context—one that is so connected and responsive to many other fields in the humanities—has fundamentally shaped my understanding of what it means to study these ancient texts and materials today,” Lee said.

The Department of Classics is happy to share the news that John Freeman was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. The Phi Beta Kappa Society, founded in 1776 and the oldest of all national honorary scholastic societies, has a chapter at Princeton. Election to this chapter is based on scholastic standing and generally includes the highest-ranking tenth of each graduating class. Congratulations John!

The Department of Classics congratulates all its students from the Class of 2024 on their graduation from Princeton University! In addition to our twelve concentrators, Princeton Classics awarded its annual thesis prize and six language and culture certificates to students from five departments.

Classics faculty have received several 2024–25 grants from the Humanities Council, including Collaborative Humanities Grants to Andrew Feldherr and Brooke Holmes. Respectively, their grants will support the Cortona Colloquia, a series of conferences for faculty and graduate students from Princeton and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa to pursue collective close-reading of a Latin work, and “Elasticities,” a workshop in classical reception studies, architectural theory, art history, and transdisciplinary study of the ancient Mediterranean.

Faculty affiliates Karen Emmerich, Wendy Heller, Samuel Holzman, and Marina Rustow received grants as well.

Princeton Classics congratulates concentrator Laurie Drayton '26 on winning the New York Classical Club's Greek Oral Reading Contest! In addition, prospective Classics major Noah Dorn '27 took first place in both the Greek and Latin undergraduate sight translation contests. For their accomplishments, the winners will be recognized at the Spring meeting of the New York Classical Club.

The Department of Classics is delighted to announce Renxiangyu (Jay) Su '25 as the winner of this year's Stinnecke Prize! One of the university's oldest awards, the Stinnecke Exam Prize comes with a one-time stipend of $3,000 and is given to the sophomore or junior in any department who receives the highest marks on a three hour examination involving translation of Greek and Latin passages as well as grammatical questions on both languages.

For the rest of May, L'École des hautes études en sciences sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences) will host Prof. Brooke Holmes as a Visiting Professor at the Center for Anthropology and the History of Ancient Worlds. While in Paris, Prof. Holmes will deliver four lectures on sympathy, cosmology, nature, and classicism in reception.

Princeton Classics is delighted to announce the promotion of faculty member Dr. Melissa Haynes to the rank of Senior Lecturer. A scholar of horror, gender, and visual culture in Imperial Latin and Greek literature, Haynes is a distinguished innovator of new courses and programs, from introductory language classes to upper-level seminars. She has taught at Princeton for nine years. 

The Humanities Council has named Daniela Mairhoferas a 2024-25 Old Dominion Research Professor. The professorship provides additional research time for Princeton faculty members and seeks to enhance the Princeton humanities community more broadly. A new medieval Latin text is at the heart of Mairhofer's two-book project as an Old Dominion professor.

Peter Heslin has been anounced as a Class of 1932 Long-Term Visiting Fellow in the Humanities Council and the Department of Classics in Spring 2025. He will teach a graduate seminar on Horace. Heslin is a scholar of Classical Latin poetry, Roman art and topography, and the digital humanities. His current research focuses on applying machine learning and Bayesian models to ancient languages, and on the poet Horace.

Princeton Classics is thrilled to congratulate graduate student Cait M. Mongrain on her appointment as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Classics Department at Colorado College. Mongrain credits her success to "the flexibility of the Princeton Classics program and the kindness and support of my faculty mentors, which allowed me to follow a course of study reflective of my changing interests and develop a dissertation I can be proud of." 

Available for order now, Prof. Caroline Cheung's debut monograph, Dolia: The Containers That Made Rome an Empire of Wine, is the story of the Roman Empire’s enormous wine industry, told through the remarkable ceramic storage and shipping containers that made it possible. We sat down with Prof. Cheung to ask her about the book, the value of material culture, and how human history might just be the story of containers.

John Freeman, a classics major from Chicago, has been selected as the Princeton Class of 2024 salutatorian. The Princeton faculty accepted the nominations of the Faculty Committee on Examinations and Standing at its April 15 meeting.

"White House officials praised Camden's jail. Women incarcerated there tell a different story."

After reviewing hundreds of pages of inspections, Classics major Hope Perry '24 spoke to women incarcerated at Camden County jail for a major investigative report in the New Jersey Monitor. 

In what he suggested could be his “second to last ever lecture,” poet and Black Studies scholar Fred Moten opened with the query, “what is a sophist—and why’s that such a bad thing to be?” Graduate student Aditi Rao reflects on his talk.

Like most college students, I chose to study abroad for life experience and cultural exposure, not to mention scratching a few countries off my bucket list. Never did I imagine that my experience would completely revolutionize my perception of Classics, in large part because of the experiential learning that proved to be invaluable.

Scholars of ancient languages and cultures are turning to large language models to help decipher ancient texts. “Developments in AI are transforming how we reconstruct the records of antiquity,” said Barbara Graziosi, chair of the Department of Classics and the Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature. She hinted that upcoming papers, drawing from her AI-assisted work, would reveal new sides of several ancient authors. “People think that we know what Aristotle said. They’re going to be surprised!”

Earlier this month, two Princeton graduate students—Pria Garcelle (Classics) and Cece Ramsey (French and Italian)—joined members of the Freedom Reads team in a visit to the Equal Justice Initiative’s Legacy Museum and National Memorial for Peace and Justice to further explore the history and the roots of racism and mass incarceration in America.

“…the plan is also to include the creative side, so we get artists involved, we get poets involved, and we get them into discussion with people doing fantastic things in the Department here. And the reality is that Princeton sees value, and the Department sees value, in those kinds of activities and supports them to no end. It’s one of the fabulous things about being here, to get that kind of support.”

After Princeton University announced it would begin offering undergraduate minors, the Classics Department’s proposal for a new minor was among the earliest accepted. We sat down with Alex Konovalov '25, the first student to enroll in the new program, for a conversation about his classics journey, his course of study, and how the two intertwine.

It was a busy day last week in Princeton Classics, as two undergraduate courses hosted guest lectures from experts in their respective fields. With a horse skull and several smaller bone-bags in tow, Prof. Katie Tardio of Bucknell came to introduce methods of zooarchaeology to “The Science of Roman History” (CLA 247). At the same time, Prof. Michael Weiss drove down from Ithaca to deliver an introduction to the obscure Italic language of Umbrian.