Sophia grew up in New York City before attending the University of Chicago where she received a BA in Classics with Honors and fell in love with Hellenistic Poetry (as well as the city of Chicago, despite her strong New Yorker identity). Although she has a soft spot for Silver Latin epic, she will always stay with her first love of Hellenistic Poetry.  She has taught Intermediate Latin at Columbia, intensive intermediate Greek, and looks forward to teaching first year Latin and Intensive first year Greek.  She works on Callimachus' Hymns and their relationship with the hybrid Greek and Egyptian ideology of Ptolemaic kingship.

back to top

back to top

Cindy lived with her family in Athens and Thessaloniki, Greece where she first developed her passion for the classics. She received her BA from Dartmouth College, worked as a banker for 10 years, then ran her own translation company for 20 years. She is now finally following her heart, completing the Postbac in Classics at Columbia and applying for the MA. She tutors and teaches Latin at a high school in Brooklyn.

back to top

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.

back to top

back to top

Isaia Mattia Crosson received his B.A. in Classics from Catholic University of Sacred Heart in 2010 and he is currently attending a M.A. program at Columbia. He is interested in Latin Epic and Didactic Poetry (Lucretius, Lucan, Ovid), Greek Epic Poetry (Homer) and Roman History (in particular the Imperial History between Second and Fourth century A.D.). He is also in love with Postmodern Transgressive Satire and Fashion Photography.

back to top

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.

back to top

Chris Dobbs was born and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. He earned a B.A. in Classical Humanities and a B.A. in Classical Languages from Miami University in May of 2011. His research has primarily focused on two topics: the ancient board games of Rome, Greece, Egypt, and Africa; the disparity between literary evidence and material (including artistic) evidence in Rome. This has led to presentations at the national Undergraduate Classics Conference in 2010 and 2011, at which he earned Third Prize for best paper each time. He also gave a presentation in Brugge, Belgium in May of 2011 and is looking forward to giving a presentation in Munich, Germany in April of 2012.

back to top

Mathias grew up in small-town Germany, where he put the classics off till college to have more time for modern languages. While his long-distance relationship with the U.S. thus delayed his love affair with Greek and Latin, it did earn him an M.A. degree in American Studies from the University of Muenster. By then thoroughly enchanted by the classics, Mathias – rather than decide between his passions – went on to study Greek and Latin in America. His first step was the Midwest, where he honed his didactic skills teaching college Latin and earned an MA in Classics at the University of Illinois. At Columbia, Mathias is mainly pursuing his interest in Intertextuality in Latin Imperial Poetry. His publications, so far, include pieces on Roman historiography, U.S. reception of the classics, and the history of classical scholarship. When he is not at work, Mathias immerses himself in Americana by kayak, bike, or pickup truck.

back to top

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.

back to top

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.

back to top

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.

back to top

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.

back to top

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.

back to top

Elia received both his BA and MA in Classics from Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. As a Master’s thesis he wrote a commentary on the Vita Avidii Cassii of the Historia Augusta. After concentrating on late historiography for years, he came to Columbia in order to deepen his understanding of Latin poetry. His publications include articles on the identification of a monument awkwardly mentioned by Aurelius Victor, on fabrications in the Historia Augusta, on the republican judge Lucius Cassius, and a textual note on Propertius.

back to top

This student is an edifying blend of urbane wit and intellectual chutzpah. Infused with elements of Greek tragedy and its reception, it is the perfect accompaniment to a Classical education.

Best taken with a pinch of salt.

Made in England

Warning: this student was manufactured in an environment of cynicism and may contain traces of sarcasm, irony, and existential despair.

back to top

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!

back to top

back to top

Barbara Vinck was born in Flanders, Belgium, a country that entered written history with De Bello Gallico. She started learning Latin at the age of 12, but already at an earlier age there were many signs of her interest  in the Classics, including one lengthy presentation on Alexander the Great that greatly puzzled her 4th grade classmates. She attended Ghent University for four years with a short intermezzo at the University of Kent in Canterbury, and is now very happy to find herself at Columbia. Barbara thinks that the only two things worth investing in are books and travels. Orbis terrarum liber est, et illi qui non commeant modo unam paginam legunt.

back to top

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. Her interests are translation, reception, epic, and Athenian drama. When not buried in a Greek or Latin dictionary, she enjoys cooking, running, and sporadically practicing the clarinet.

back to top