CLASSICS - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Instruction
- Expo Coordinator
Job Titles:
- Chairman
- Chairman of the Department of Classics Professor of Art History, Classics, and in the Humanities
- Department Chair
- People
- Professor
Ann C. Gunter's work addresses the visual and material culture of the ancient Near East and its Eastern Mediterranean neighbors. Her primary research interests include artistic and cultural interaction between the Mediterranean and the Near East; the relationship between material culture and social and cultural identity; and the reception of ancient Greek and Near Eastern art in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Among her recent publications are Greek Art and the Orient (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and contributions to A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East (Wiley-Blackwell 2012) and Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art (in press). She is currently editing A Companion to the Art of the Ancient Near East (Wiley-Blackwell) and preparing for final publication the Late Bronze and Early Iron Age ceramics from the site of Kinet Höyük, on Turkey's Mediterranean coast.
Ann Gunter
Chair of the Department of Classics; Professor of Art History, Classics, and in the Humanities
Phone number: 847-467-0873
Office location: Kresge Hall Room 4303
a-gunter@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- John Evans Professor of Latin Professor of English, Classics, and History
Job Titles:
- Director
- Distinguished Professor
Job Titles:
- Emeritus Faculty
- Professor Emeritus ( Classics )
Dan Garrison's interests encompass Greek and Latin epic and lyric poetry, and ancient and Renaissance medicine. His recent publications include The Student's Catullus, 4th edition (Oklahoma, 2012) and an edited volume, A Cultural History of the Human Body in Antiquity (Berg, 2010), as well as The Fabric of the Human Body: An Annotated Translation of Andreas Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (1543, 1555) (two volumes: Karger, forthcoming). A third book is The China Root Epistle of Andreas Vesalius (1546): an annotated translation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
See also, Vesalius Project. A descriptive list of Garrison's publications can be found at Daniel Garrison on the faculty web server.
Job Titles:
- Associate Department Chair & Director of Latin Instruction
- People
Francesca Tataranni specializes in the history of archaic, and republican Rome, with a focus on ethnicity in pre-Roman Italy. She has published articles on the ethnic identity of the Samnites and other ancient peoples of central and southern Italy. At Northwestern, Francesca teaches Latin language and literature and Roman history courses and serves as Director of the Latin program. Because of her interest in classical receptions in modern America, Tataranni is a major research collaborator in the Classicizing Chicago Project and has served as the convener of the Kaplan Institute Classical Receptions Research Workshop for the past three years. With the support of an Arthur Vining Davis Foundations grant and an Alumnae of Northwestern University Award for Curriculum Development she designed a digital humanities research seminar titled "Ancient Rome in Chicago" which produced a highly innovative virtual walking tour of the city. Tataranni is a 2009 winner of a WCAS Alumni Teaching Award, was elected eight times to the Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll (2007-2009, 2011, 2013-2016), and is the recipient of the 2017 Charles Deering McCormick Distinguished University Professor of Instruction Award.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Instruction
- People
- Undergraduate Student Advisory Board Advisor & Student Leadership
Germán Campos Muñoz completed his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at the Pennsylvania State University. His research interrogates the reception and transformation of the Greco-Roman classics in Latin American literature and culture. His book, The Classics in South America: Five Case Studies (Bloomsbury, 2021), proposes a transhistorical study of these receptions by examining five case studies selected from key cultural and political moments of the early and late colonial period, the emancipatory era, and the 20th and 21st centuries. He has also published articles on this topic in venues including Dieciocho, Hispanic Review, and Latin American Research Review. Additional research and teaching interests include the disciplinary histories of the world and comparative literature, and literary theory and criticism.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor Emeritus ( Classics )
James Packer's major interests include Roman archaeology and the architecture of imperial Rome. His recent excavations in the Theater of Pompey are reported in the American Journal of Archaeology 110 (2006): 93-122; 111 (2007): 505-522 and in the Bullettino della Commissione Archeologica Comunale di Roma 111 (2010): 71-96; For an early account of his work on the site see: Institutum Romanum Norvegiae, Acta ad Archaeologiam et Artium Historiam Pertinentia 27 (2012-13) 9-39. His Roman Forum, A Reconstruction and Architectural Guide, with Professor G. Gorski, appeared in spring, 2015 (read a review by Fred S. Kleiner, Boston University). In 2018, he Archaeological Institute of America gave this monograph the James R. Wiseman Book Award. In 2019, the Archaeological Institute and the Loeb Classical Library foundation awarded Prof Packer grants to support the final work on his new book, The Theater of Pompey in Rome.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature
Job Titles:
- John Evans Professor of Latin Professor of English, Classics, and History
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- People
Kathryn Bosher's time at Northwestern is carried on through the Bosher Collection, a searchable digital database of records pertaining to the history of performances of Greek and Roman drama on Chicago area stages from 1840 to the present.
Kathryn died in March of 2013 and is missed. You can read her obituary here.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics and Comparative Literary Studies
- Graduate Classics Cluster Director
- People
Marianne Govers Hopman (PhD Harvard University and Paris Sorbonne) is a scholar of ancient Greek culture with an expertise in archaic and classical poetry and special interests in literary theory, feminist studies, animal studies, posthumanism, and the environmental humanities. She is the author of Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox (Cambridge University Press, 2012), the co-editor of Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and the author of articles on Homer, Athenian tragedy, and Greek hymns. Her current book project, entitled Prometheus' Gifts: Environment and Technology in Fifth-Century Athens, draws on the fields of Classics and the environmental humanities to offer a contemporary reading of the fifth-century BCE tragedy Prometheus Bound as an attempt to come to grips with the question of how humans and their inventions fit into the world.
Hopman served as director of the French Interdisciplinary Group from 2012 to 2017 and chaired the Classics Department at Northwestern University from 2018 to 2022. Honors and fellowships include the John J. Winkler Memorial Prize, a grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and an AT&T Research Fellowship. In early 2015, Professor Hopman was named a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques by the French Ministry of Culture.
At Northwestern she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Homer, Athenian tragedy, ancient love poetry, and their reception through contemporary times. In both her research and teaching, she asks how the study of the ancient past can contribute to historicize, criticize, and possibly modify the contours of current debates, especially those pertaining to gendered hierarchies and the environmental crisis.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor Emeritus ( Classics and English )
Martin Mueller is the author of Children of Oedipus and Other Essays on the Imitation of Greek Tragedy 1550-1800 (1980), a monograph on the Iliad (1984), and a variety of essays on the Nachleben of ancient literature, Shakespeare's use of his sources, and the place of literary studies in a professional and technological environment. He is the editor of the Chicago Homer, a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek. He is also the general editor of WordHoard, an application for the close reading and scholarly analysis of deeply tagged texts, funded by the Mellon Foundation. Together with John Unsworth he is the co-principal investigator of MONK (Metadata Create New Knowledge), a project to create something like a "cultural genome" of nearly a billion words of written English from Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye (1474) to Virginia Woolf's fixing of December 1910 as the beginning of the modern world--and a date conveniently close to the current expiration of copyright. MONK is also funded by the Mellon Foundation.
Nava Cohen received her BA in Slavic Languages and Literatures and Mathematics and her Master's in Education, both from Northwestern University. Prior to returning to graduate school, Nava spent over twenty years teaching Latin to young students in a variety of settings. Nava's research interests include the pedagogy of reading Latin and Greek, the reception of ancient literature in contemporary adolescent fiction, and the ethics of reading ancient text, specifically how we integrate modern understandings of justice and equity with an implicit respect for text and author.
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- People
- Study Abroad Advisor
Nick Winters (PhD Duke University) is a classicist and former physicist specializing in ancient mathematics and science. His dissertation, "Schools of Greek Mathematical Practice" (2020), proposed a major revision to the history of Greek mathematics, organizing ancient texts into networks of information transmission and methodology. He spent 2022-23 as a fellow at the American School of Classical Studies st Athens.
Outside of mathematics, Dr. Winters' work has included projects in ancient medicine, music, engineering, and practical sciences such as surveying and accounting, weaving and textile arts, timekeeping, and navigation. Beyond the ancient sciences, Dr. Winters teaches courses on the history of books and textual scholarship, ancient gender and sexuality, and Greek and Roman historiography. He is an editor of the undergraduate research journal Philomathes, a member of the Hellenic Institute for Cultural Diplomacy, and chair of the Trans in Classics organization.
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor Emeritus of English
Reginald Gibbons is the author of nine books and two chapbooks of poems, a novel, and other works, including translations (with Charles Segal) of Bakkhai and Antigone and translations of Sophokles, Selected Poems: Odes and Fragments. His book Creatures of a Day was nominated for the 2008 National Book Award for a poetry collection. During 2011-12, he was a Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies. He has also translated Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda and a volume of poems and prose by Jorge Guillén (trans. with Anthony L. Geist), and he edited and served as principal translator for New Writing from Mexico, a special issue of TriQuarterly magazine. He is Director of the Center for the Writing Arts, has served as Chair of the English Department, and is an affiliate of the Classical Receptions Workshop
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor Emeritus of Classics and Philosophy
Richard Kraut's interests include contemporary moral and political philosophy, as well as the ethics and political thought of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. His historical studies include Socrates and the State (Princeton: 1984), Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: 1989), Aristotle Politics Books VII and VIII, translation with commentary (Clarendon: 1997), Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford: 2002), and How to Read Plato (Granta: 2008). He is the editor of the Cambridge Companion to Plato (1992), Plato's Republic: Critical Essays (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), and the Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (2006). He served as President of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1993-4, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Center for Hellenic Studies., and the Guggenheim Foundation. In 2006 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Robert Wallace is the author of some eighty-five articles on various aspects of Greek history, intellectual history, literature, law, numismatics, and music theory. His books include The Areopagos Council, to 307 BC (1989) which was awarded the Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities by the Council of Graduate Schools, and Reconstructing Damon. Music, Wisdom Teaching, and Politics in Perikles' Athens (2015). He co-authored Origins of Democracy in Ancient Greece with Josiah Ober and Kurt Raaflaub (2007) and Aristotle's Constitution of the Athenians (2015), with Chloe Balla. He has co-edited four volumes: Harmonia Mundi: Musica e filosofia nel'antichità; Poet, Public, and Performance in Ancient Greece; Transitions to Empire 360-146 BC; and Symposion 2001 (on Greek law). His current projects include books on Sophokles and Thucydides, and Plato Rhetorician and the Historical Sokrates. He has lectured widely in the United States and in Europe.
Job Titles:
- Director
- Member of the Global Antiquities Kaplan Research Workshop Steering Committee
- Director of Greek Instruction
- Global Antiquities Kaplan Research Workshop Steering Committee
- People
- Professor
- Professor of Instruction of Classics and Director of the Ancient Greek Program / PhD University of Washington
Ryan Platte earned his PhD from the University of Washington. His interests concern the history of language and poetic technique in Greek literature, while his research focuses principally on the Homeric corpus. This work privileges a linguistic approach to literary material and draws from the field of comparative Indo-European poetics. He has published on Greek lyric poetry and on epic, including a book, Equine Poetics, on Indo-European influences on the treatment of horses and horsemanship in Homer. He has also published on cinematic reception of Homer.
Professor of Instruction of Classics and Director of the Ancient Greek Program
Phone number: 847-467-6976
Office location: Kresge Hall Room 4355
ryan.platte@northwestern.edu
Francesca Tataranni
Charles Deering McCormick University Distinguished Professor of Instruction of Classics and Director of the Latin Program
Phone number: 847-491-8029
Office location: Kresge Hall Room 4363
f-tataranni@northwestern.edu
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of Classics and Political Science
S. Sara Monoson is the author of Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (2000). Her research interests include Greek political theory in historical context and classical reception studies, especially the history of appropriations of Greek philosophers in American political discourse (e.g., about abolition, war and peace, labor and industry, cold war, civil rights, education). She is currently working on two projects, Socrates in the Vernacular, a study of the figure of Socrates in 20th century popular media in the US, Canada and Greece, and Socrates in Combat, an account of the significance Plato attaches to military service and return in his theory of justice and in his portrait of Socrates' distinctiveness.
Job Titles:
- People
- Specialist in the History and Culture of Byzantium
- Visiting Professor
Sergey Ivanov is a specialist in the history and culture of Byzantium and in Byzantino-Slavic relations. He published more than two hundred scholarly articles and several books, including In Search of Constantinople: A Guidebook through Byzantine Istanbul and Its Surroundings (Istanbul, 2022, translated into Russian, Bulgarian, Serbian and Turkish), Pearls Before Swine: Missionary Work in Byzantium (Paris, 2015, translated into Russian, Czech and Serbian), and Holy Fools in Byzantium and Beyond (Oxford, 2006, translated into Russian, Serbian, Czech and Rumanian).
Ivanov is a Corresponding Member of the British Academy.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Classics and History
Job Titles:
- People
- Professor of English, Comparative Literary Studies and
Will West works primarily in early modern literature, in particular English and European performance traditions, and on the metamorphosis of classical traditions in Renaissance Europe. He studied Classics at Yale University and Corpus Christi College, Oxford University, before earning a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature (Michigan). West has written Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge UP, 2002) and co-edited Robert Weimann's Author's Pen and Actor's Voice: Writing and Playing in Shakespeare's Theatre (Cambridge UP, 2000) as well as a Festschrift honoring Weimann, Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern Stage (Palgrave, 2005). He contributed a short history of encyclopedias before the Enlightenment to the 2013 Venice Biennale catalog. Current research includes projects on the experiences of playgoing in Shakespeare's London, and the philology of Angelo Poliziano. In 2007 West was awarded a place on the ASG Faculty Honor Roll. In 2012-13 he was an NEH Fellow at the Huntington Library, and in 2015 he was an Invited Professor at the École Normale Supérieure-Lyon. He is currently a Trustee of the Shakespeare Association of America and co-editor of the journal Renaissance Drama.