Kate has been fixated on Persius for approximately 9 years. The obscure poet led her to Lucan and through him to geography of the empire, and, on the other hand, backwards to the humour of the late Republic. Her own utter lack of a sense of humour has forced her to ask "What is funny?" She does not yet have her answer, but is determined that her dissertation will provide one. B.A. Columbia; M.Phil. Cambridge; M.A. Princeton.

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Claire Catenaccio received her A.B. in Classics from Harvard University in 2007, and completed her M.Phil. in Classics at Oxford in 2009, where she was also awarded a teaching certification. Her main areas of interest are Homer and ancient drama. She has written on the significance of lamed figures in Greek mythology, on the use of masks in Attic tragedy, and on the role of dreams in the plays of Aeschylus. As an dramaturge and director, she has also worked extensively with modern stagings of ancient drama. In her free time, Claire is a mediocre pianist, a modern dance enthusiast, and a practitioner of Vinyasa yoga.

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Anna Conser received her B.A. in 2007 from Carleton College, followed by additional study at the University of Damascus, Syria (2009-10).  In 2010 she received a Fulbright Fellowship in Germany to conduct research on Herodotus and ancient geography.  Her interests circle around the aesthetics of paradox/wonder in both Greek and Latin poetry, as well as ancient geography/cosmography.  Classical Arabic reception still lurks in the shadows.  Anna also attempts balance the intake of so much ancient wonder and beauty with endeavors to produce some of her own, particularly in film and musical theater.

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Caleb Dance was born in Denver, CO, where his folks still reside. While spending his undergrad years at Tulane University in New Orleans, LA, he worked on degrees in Classics and Philosophy and came to appreciate the countless reasons why people live in a city that is (only partially) below sea-level. He moved to New York City, NY in 2007, and he has been (t)here ever since. His siblings all live in the area, and he gets to see many of his good friends whenever he walks into the graduate student office. In addition to reading books and articles on laughter, Caleb fills his days with teaching, cycling, and playing music.

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Mathias spent his first years of graduate education in his native Germany, where he earned an MA in American Studies from the University of Münster (2009). Αfter crossing the Atlantic, he followed up with an MA in Classics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (2009) and an MPhil (Classics, 2012) from Columbia University. In New York, he has been focusing on Greek and Roman drama and its reception in Latin prose and poetry. He has also worked on political biases in Roman Republican historiography, the History of Classical Scholarship, and U.S.-American appropriations of the classics. These interests have led to publications in Rheinisches Museum, Historische Zeitschrift, DNP, and the forthcoming Blackwell Companions to "Terence" and "Silver Epic". Mathias is currently serving as editorial assistant to TAPA under Prof. Katharina Volk, and his dissertation is examining "The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus", tracing the Romans' creative engagement with the comic heritage from Terence to Seneca and beyond. When not at his desk or teaching Greek and Latin, Mathias enjoys exploring New York (and the rest of the continent) by kayak, bike, or rental car.

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Sarah Kaczor received her BA from Mount Holyoke College in Classics and English, taught high school Latin and English for three years, and completed a postbac at Columbia.

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Charley McNamara grew up in northern Michigan amid state forests and snow drifts, and he began his study of the Classics as an undergraduate at Harvard University. After he received his A.B. in 2007, he joined Teach for America and taught high school English in rural Arkansas, beginning classes by chanting lines of Seneca in unison with his students. He also taught Latin in Arkansas to a real estate agent and a casino card dealer. When he gets his nose out of the books, he finds himself running marathons, memorizing obscure two- and three-letter words for Scrabble, and brushing up his piano playing.

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Elizabeth received a BA in classics with a concentration in Latin from Georgetown University in 2008, where she graduated summa cum laude and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.  She also received distinction for her senior thesis on Apuleius' Metamorphoses.   She has previously served as a teaching assistant for the department's course on Classical Myth, and she is currently excited to be a teaching assistant for Greek 1202: Homer.

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Simone grew up in a tiny town in northern California and received a B.A. in Classical Languages and Comparative Literature (with a minor in Dance and Performance Studies) from U.C. Berkeley in 2009. She took her first Latin course in her sophomore year of college and graduated four years later after directing the first production in ancient Greek on the Berkeley campus in over 80 years and writing an honors thesis on a textual issue in Euripides’ Hippolytus. After graduation she taught at an Italian language immersion preschool in San Francisco for two years. She also taught SAT preparation courses and Latin as a substitute teacher. When she is not studying, she enjoys running in the park, practicing yoga, and seeing performances in NYC.

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Mphil (Classics) Columbia, 2008, MA (Classics): Columbia, 2005, BA (Classics) National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, 2002. Nina is an ABD Graduate Student in Classics and loves teaching, dance, and traveling. Her dissertation on Aristophanes combines approaches from literary and performance studies, and is currently titled "Space and Staging in Aristophanes: Portraying the civic and domestic world on stage." Nina participated in the Columbia/Barnard Drama group as dancer, actor, choreographer and chorus director in the 2005 production of Iphigeneia at Aulis and the 2004 production of Oedipus Tyrannus. Her teaching experience includes: Literature Humanities (in Columbia's Core Curriculum), Classical Mythology (literature and art), Intensive Elementary Greek, Intensive Elementary Latin, and Intermediate Latin I and II (selections from Cicero, Catullus, Ovid, Seneca, and Pliny). In 2010 she was nominated for an Award for Teaching Excellence in the Core Curriculum. She lives in New York with her husband and two daughters, Nora and Natalía. She is looking forward to teaching the Classics all her life.

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Elia received both his BA and MA in Classics from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. He mainly focuses on Augustan poetry and late Latin historiography, and has published articles on the s.c. Historia Augusta, Aurelius Victor, and Propertius. He is currently studying puns in pseudo-Trebellius Pollio.

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Ashley Simone graduated from Baylor University in 2011 as a University Scholar with a concentration in Classics. As an undergraduate, Ashley volunteered at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, studied abroad at the University of St. Andrews, and rode for Baylor’s NCAA women’s equestrian team. She wrote her senior honors thesis on dysfunctional art in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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Eric Sloat is from Ann Arbor, Michigan. He started learning Latin(somewhat unwillingly) in the 6th grade, but kept it up and took many National Latin Exams along the way. He attended St. John's College in Annapolis, MD, and graduated from there in 2005 with a BA in the Liberal Arts. After graduation, he moved to New York, held a boring job, and then began to pursue the classics-dream once again by enrolling in Columbia's post baccalaureate program (sadly, a BA in the Liberal Arts is generally useless). He worked hard for 2 years, and was very happy/astonished to be accepted into Columbia's graduate program. At the time of writing this bio (spring 2010) he is a 2nd year PhD student completing his course requirements and TA'ing Kristina Milnor's "Classics in Film" course (for the record, he does not like the movie, "300"). Like a good Johnnie, Eric's field of interests is wide and ever-changing, but he's recently taken a liking to Plutarch, especially with regard to Plutarch's use and abuse of his Platonic models in the "Political Precepts" and "Erotikos". Eric also thinks that writing in the 3rd person in strange.  Cheers!

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Phil Stamato hails from the post-industrial valleys of Binghamton, New York. He entered into Classics when he was 12 years old under the guiding hand of a true philologus linguae Latinae, whose passion for the language and history that stands frozen in ink and stone today has shot him on a straight path to the present. Since then, the exotic intrigue of the Classical world, mixed with the relatable remnants of Western culture as it toyed with its new-found literacy have kept him reading. He received his B.A. in Latin Literature from Franklin & Marshall College in 2011, and arrived at Columbia University immediately after. While Classics has instilled in him a broad range of interests, there is undoubtedly a tint of historical and socio-linguistic curiosities to his course. Most importantly, he has found that if one truly seeks the epithet πολύτροπος (a "man of many turns"), the Classics contain more than enough to leave an Odysseus wandering the wine-dark sea for millennia.

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Jenny Wasson grew up in California and Arizona, those strange places where "old" means from the 1960's and "snow" is something you see on TV. She began studying Latin as a teenager as a way to channel her unattainable desire to become a 19th century British Egyptologist into the most related field offered by her high school. It turned out Latin was pretty cool in its own right, so she stuck with it. After getting her BA in Latin and Greek at Vassar, Jenny spent the next year working on a dig in Greece, toiling in paper sales in New York, and pining to return to dead languages. When not buried in a Greek or Latin dictionary, she enjoys cooking, running, and sporadically practicing the clarinet.

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