MICHAEL I. ALLEN (Associate Professor) has prepared an edition of the ninth-century historian Frechulf of Lisieux and is the author of articles on medieval Latin historiography and poetry. His teaching is focused primarily on the Latin literature of the Middle Ages and on Latin palaeography.

CLIFFORD ANDO (Professor) is the author of Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire, for which he was awarded the APA's Goodwin Award in 2003, and The Matter of the Gods (2008). He is the editor of Roman Religion (2003) and co-editor, with Jörg Rüpke, of Religion and Law in Classical and Christian Rome (2006). His current research examines problems of law, administration and cultural change in the Roman empire.

ELIZABETH ASMIS (Professor) is the author of Epicurus' Scientific Method and articles on Plato, Philodemus, Lucretius, Epictetus,  Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius. Her current research focuses on Roman Stoicism and Cicero's political philosophy.  Her teaching covers Greek and Roman philosophy and literary criticism. She is the editor of Classical Philology.

FRANCISCO BARRENECHEA (Visiting Assistant Professor) has written articles on Euripides, Greek literary papyri, and Lucan. He is currently preparing a book on Aristophanes' Wealth. His interests include ancient drama and its reception (particularly Old Comedy and Euripides), Hellenistic poetry, Latin epic and novel, and papyrology.

SHADI BARTSCH (Ann L. and Lawrence B. Buttenwieser Professor of Classics) is the author of Decoding the Ancient Novel; Actors in the Audience; Ideology in Cold Blood: A Reading of Lucan's Civil War; and, most recently, The Mirror of the Self:  Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. She has also edited volumes on the history of rhetoric; Eros; and ekphrasis. Her teaching is primarily devoted to Roman literature and culture, and her current research addresses figural language in antiquity. She has received both the Quantrell Teaching Award and a Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching. On leave, 2008-2009.

ALAIN BRESSON (Professor) is an historian of the ancient world with particular interests in the ancient economy, the Hellenistic world, and the epigraphy of Rhodes and Asia Minor. He is the author of La cité marchande (Bordeaux 2000); L'économie de la Grèces des cités (2 volumes; Paris 2007-2008), and Recueil des inscriptions de la Pérée rhodienne (Paris 1991), among other books; and editor of some five more, on matters of economics, civic life, writing and public power, and the history of the family.

HELMA DIK (Associate Professor) is the author of Word Order in Ancient Greek and Word Order in Greek Tragic Dialogue, and articles on the functional grammar of Greek. Her teaching and research are focused on the Greek language, incorporating insights from general linguistics and functionalist frameworks especially. Her main long-term project is a Syntax of Classical Greek, but her current interests also include the application of data mining techniques to classical texts and digital humanities in the age of Google more generally. She recently received the Quantrell Teaching Award.

CHRISTOPHER A. FARAONE (Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the Humanities and in the College) His work is primarily concerned with ancient Greek religion and  poetry.  He is co-editor (with D. Dodd) of Initiation in Ancient Greek Rituals and Narratives: New Critical Perspectives (2003) and (with L. McClure) of Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (2005), and author of Talismans and Trojan Horses: Guardian Statues in Ancient Greek Myth and Ritual  (1992), Ancient Greek Love Magic (1999) and The Stanzaic Architecture Ancient Greek Elegiac Poetry (2008). On leave, 2008-2009.

JONATHAN M. HALL (Phyllis Fay Horton Professor in the Humanities; Department Chair) is the author of Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity, for which he was awarded the APA's  Goodwin Award  in 1999, and Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture, (University of Chicago Press, 2002). He has just completed A History of the Archaic Greek World for Blackwell and has written several articles and reviews on the social and cultural history of archaic Greece. His teaching is focused on Greek history, historiography, and archaeology.

W. R. JOHNSON (John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, Emeritus) is the author of, among others, Lucretius and the Modern World; Momentary Monsters: Lucan and His Heroes; Luxuriance and Economy: Cicero and the Alien Style; Darkness Visible: A Study of Vergil's "Aeneid"; The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry; Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in "Epistles" 1. He has also written articles and reviews on Vergil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid, and Terence. His teaching has been devoted to Latin poetry of all periods and to Greek and Latin rhetoric

DAVID MARTINEZ (Associate Professor) is the author of P. Michigan XVI: A Greek Love Charm from Egypt and Baptized for our Sakes: A Leather Trisagion from Egypt. He has also written articles on documentary Greek papyri and ancient Greek religion and magic. His current projects include the publication of the Texas papyri and projects which relate papyrological research to the study of early Christianity. His teaching interests focus on Greek papyrology and paleography, Greek language, Hellenistic authors, and early Christian literature.

EMANUEL MAYER (Assistant Professor) has written Rome is Where the Emperor is: State Monuments in the Decentralised Roman Empire from Diocletian to Theodosius II (Mainz, 2001; in German). His interests span political imagery of the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial periods, representational behavior of Roman elites under the Empire, as well as ancient urbanism.

SARAH NOOTER (Assistant Professor) has written articles and reviews on Greek tragedy and modern reception. She is working on a book about Sophocles and poetic language. Her interests include Athenian drama, archaic poetry and religious thought, literary theory and linguistics, and contemporary poetry and theater.

MARK PAYNE (Assistant Professor) is the author of several articles on Greek poetry and poetics from the archaic to the Hellenistic periods. His first book, Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2007. His second book, The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination, is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. He is the book review editor for Classical Philology and a member of the University's Poetry and Poetics program.

JAMES M. REDFIELD (Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor) has written Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector; The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy and articles on Homer, Herodotus, Plato, and Greek society. His teaching is focused on Greek language, literature, and social history as they can be understood in the light of theory drawn from modern linguistics and anthropology.

D. NICHOLAS RUDALL (Professor Emeritus) has recently published translations of Euripides' Bacchae and The Iphigeneia Plays and Sophocles' Electra and Antigone. A translation of The Trojan Women is forthcoming. These translations are meant for performance. Mr Rudall has directed many classical works at the Court Theatre, of which he is the founding director. His teaching is focused on tragedy and the ancient theater, Aristophanes, and Propertius.  

PETER WHITE (Herman C. Bernick Family Professor; Associate Chair for Undergraduate Affairs) has written Promised Verse: Poets and Poetry in the Society of Augustan Rome, for which he won the APA's Goodwin Award in 1995, and articles and reviews on Horace, Statius, Martial, the Historia Augusta, and the place of poets in Roman society. He is presently writing a book on Cicero's letters. His teaching is focused on Roman comedy and satire and on Greek and Roman historiography.

DAVID WRAY  (Associate Professor) is the author of Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood (Cambridge 2001) and is currently writing Phaedra’s Virtue: Ethics, Gender, and Seneca’s Tragedy. His research and teaching interests include Hellenistic and Roman poetry (especially Apollonius Rhodius, Catullus, Lucretius, Virgil, Tibullus, Ovid, Seneca, Lucan, and Statius); Greek epic and tragedy; Roman philosophy; ancient and modern relations between literature and philosophy; gender; theory and practice of literary translation; and the reception of Greco-Roman thought and literature, from Shakespeare and Corneille to Pound and Zukofsky. He is a member of the University's Poetry and Poetics program.

Associate members of the department include:

JONATHAN BEERE (Assistant Professor of Philosophy) works primarily on classical philosophy, especially Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. He is currently writing a book about Aristotle's Metaphysics with the working title The Priority of Active Being.

LEE BEHNKE (Lecturer) teaches Latin and Humanities courses and runs summer programs abroad. Her interests are Latin poetry and its literary legacy. Office: Gates-Blake 404 (773-702-3319).

TAMARA CHIN (Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature) is currently completing a book on early Chinese representations of foreignness and inter-cultural exchange under Han dynasty imperial expansion.  Her interests include ancient Chinese and Greek comparative studies, and her second project is on the development of the modern idea of an ancient Silk Road spanning the Greco-Roman and Chinese cultural spheres.

MICHAEL DIETLER (Associate Professor of Anthropology, PAMW Affiliate) is the author of Archaeologies of Colonialism and numerous articles on ancient Mediterranean colonialism. He is co-director of excavations at Lattes (Languedoc), investigating Etruscan, Greek, and Roman colonial encounters in southern France. His teaching interests include: archaeology and ethnoarchaeology, colonialism, political economy, economic anthropology and Celtic Studies.

JAS ELSNER (Visiting Professor of Art History) is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and works primarily on Classical and Late Antique Art, the reception of Ancient Art, and Ekphrasis.

ELIZABETH GEBHARD (Research Associate) is author of The Theatre at Isthmia and director of the University's Excavations at Isthmia

CAMERON HAWKINS (Assistant Professor of History) specializes in the history of the ancient Mediterranean world, with a primary focus on the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, and secondary interests in both classical Greece and the Achaemenid Persian empire. He is currently working on a book that explores not only the nature of  the urban economy in which Roman artisans lived and worked, but also  the ways in which the strategies they adopted in order to stay in  business were shaped by their social relationships with other  artisans, family members, and former slaves.

JANET JOHNSON (Morton D. Hull Distinguished Service Professor of Egyptology, PAMW Affiliate) studies Egyptian language and Egypt in the "Late Period" (1st millennium B.C.). Her recent publications include the 3rd edition of her teaching grammar of Demotic, Thus Wrote 'Onchsheshonqy (available online at http://www&-oi.uchicago.edu/OI/DEPT/PUB/SRC/SAOC/45/SAOC45.html ) as well as articles on ethnicity and the legal and economic status of women in Ancient Egypt. She is also Director of the Chicago Demotic Dictionary Project and Director of the Egyptian Readingbook Project.

WALTER KAEGI (Professor of History and Voting Member of the Oriental Institute, PAMW Affiliate) concentrates his research on Byzantine and Late Roman history, especially from the fourth through eleventh centuries, with special attention to the seventh century. He investigates relationships between Byzantium and the Near East, including Islam, military and historiographical subjects, and their interrelationships with religion and thought. He is the co-founder of the Byzantine Studies Conference and the editor of the journal Byzantinische Forschungen.

GABRIEL RICHARDSON LEAR (Assistant Professor of Philosophy) is the author of  Happy Lives and the Highest Good: An Essay on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (Princeton 2004) and of several articles on Plato's and Aristotle's ethics. Currently, she is writing about the ideal of unity in Plato's poetics and ethics and about Aristotle's theory of practical wisdom.

BRUCE LINCOLN (Caroline E. Haskell Professor of History of Religions, PAMW Affiliate) has thematic interests that gravitate toward the social and political dimensions of myth, ritual, and cosmology and he works with materials from Greece, Rome, Achaemenid Persia, and Prechristian Northern Europe. His books include Authority: Construction and Corrosion, Death, War, and Sacrifice: Studies in Ideology and Practice, and Holy Terrors: Thinking About Religion After September 11. He is also the 2003 recipient of the University of Chicago Press Laing award for his recent book, Theorizing Myth: Narrative, Ideology, and Scholarship.

GLENN MOST (Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought) was trained in Classics and in Comparative Literature. He is interested in ancient literature and philosophy, especially Greek, and especially in the reception and influence of Classical antiquity in later periods.

RICHARD T. NEER (David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor of Humanities, Art History and the College, PAMW Affiliate) is the author of Style and Politics in Athenian Vase-Painting: The Craft of Democracy, ca. 530-460 B.C.E. (Cambridge University Press, 2002), Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum: Malibu, J. Paul Getty Museum, fascicule 7 (Getty, 1997), and articles on Athenian pottery, theories of style, Archaic Greek sculpture, and seventeenth-century French painting. Interests include the development of naturalism in Greek art, Athenian history and questions of representation, architectural sculpture at Delphi and Olympia, and philosophical aesthetics.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM (Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor in Law and Philosophy) is the author of many writings on philosophy, literature, and the law, including The Fragility of Goodness; Love's Knowledge; The Therapy of Desire; and Poetic Justice.

WENDY OLMSTED (Professor in the New Collegiate Division, Humanities Division, and PAMW Affiliate) has written Rhetoric: An Historical Introduction and The Imperfect Friend: Emotion and Rhetoric in the Work of Sidney and Milton (2008). Both books analyze deliberative rhetoric and emotion in ancient Greek and Roman writers as well as in Renaissance writings.  She has also published articles on rhetoric, Homer, Boethius, and Augustine along with Spenser and Sidney, and has co-edited Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry and A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism. Her teaching focuses on archaic Greek epic, history, and rhetoric along with English Renaissance literature, literary history, and rhetoric.

DENNIS PARDEE (Professor of Northwest Semitics, PAMW Affiliate)

VERITY PLATT (Assistant Professor of Art History) is the author of articles on Greek religious art, Roman wall-painting and sarcophagi, ancient intaglios, the relationship between art and text in antiquity, and Classics and film. She is currently writing a book on epiphany and representation in Graeco-Roman culture, and co-editing a volume on framing devices in classical art.

SETH F. C. RICHARDSON (Assistant Professor of Ancient Near Eastern History, PAMW Affiliate) is responsible for NELC's graduate program in Ancient Near Eastern History and is the Mesopotamian Faculty Advisor to the Oriental Institute Museum.  He works primarily on Old Babylonian political and economic history, including a book in preparation about the collapse of the First Dynasty of Babylon, 1683-1597 B.C.  His other interests include Assyrian political history, the intellectual history of early Babylonian liver divination, Ancient Near East labor history, state collapse, and chronology.

KENT RIGSBY (Professor Emeritus of Epigraphy and Ancient History, Duke University) works on Greek inscriptions and history, with particular interests in civic life, religion, and historical geography. His current projects include an edition of the inscriptions of Cos for Inscriptiones Graecae and a book on Greek religion in the Hellenistic period. He is editor of the journal Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies.

ROBERT RITNER (Professor of Egyptology, PAMW Affiliate) specializes in Roman, Hellenistic, Late and Third Intermediate Period (Libyan and Nubian) Egypt. He is the author of the volume The Mechanics of Ancient Egyptian Magical Practice. His research and publications treat Egyptian religion, magic, medicine, language and literature, as well as social and political history.

MARTHA ROTH (Professor of Assyriology, PAMW Affiliate) researches and publishes on the legal and social history of the ancient Near East. Her primary interests have been on family law and on women's legal and social issues, and on the compilation and transmission of law norms. Currently, she is working on a project on Mesopotamian law cases. She is also editor-in-charge of the Oriental Institute's Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project, which oversees compilation of the twenty-six volume CAD.

DAVID SCHLOEN (Associate Professor of Syro-Palestinian Archaeology, PAMW Affiliate) specializes in the archaeology and socioeconomic history of the Bronze and Iron Age Levant. He has previously excavated at Ashkelon and at the Early Bronze Age village site of Yaqush in the northern Jordan valley and is currently involved in a new project to reexcavate the second-millennium B.C. city of Alalakh in the Amuq Valley in southern Turkey. He is currently working on a book that explores the mutually interacting socioeconomic and ideological changes that took place in the Levant during the first millennium B.C., in ancient Israel and elsewhere.

LAURA SLATKIN (Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought) has written The Power of Thetis: Allusion and Interpretation in the Iliad and articles on Greek epic. She is the co-editor of Antiquities in Histories of Post-War French Thought and is currently working on a book on Hesiod. Her teaching is focused on early Greek culture, particularly on archaic Greek poetry, and she is a former recipient of the Quantrell Teaching Award.

JONATHAN Z. SMITH (Robert O. Anderson Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities, and the College, PAMW Affiliate) is a historian of religions whose research has focused on such wide-ranging subjects as ritual theory, Hellenistic religions, nineteenth-century Maori cults, and the notorious events of Jonestown, Guyana. Some of his works include Map is Not Territory; Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown; and To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual. In his book Drudgery Divine: On the Comparison of Early Christianities and the Religions of Late Antiquity, he demonstrates how four centuries of scholarship on early Christianities manifest a Catholic-Protestant polemic

MATTHEW W. STOLPER (Professor of Assyriology and the John A. Wilson Professor of Oriental Studies, PAMW Affiliate) has worked primarily on legal and administrative texts from Achaemenid Babylonia, dealing with the social, economic and political history of the region ca. 450-300 BC. He is currently working on emergency recording of Achaemenid Elamite and Achaemenid Aramaic administrative texts excavated by the Oriental Institute in 1933 at Persepolis. His teaching interests include Akkadian historical and legal texts of the late first millennium, with forays into Old Persian and Elamite language and Achaemenid history. He serves on the editorial boards of the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, the Journal of Cuneiform Studies, and ARTA.

THEO VAN DEN HOUT (Professor of Hittite and Anatolian Languages, PAMW Affiliate) is executive editor of the Chicago Hittite Dictionary. He is interested in questions of ancient record management, Hittite history and linguistics as well as the history and languages of first millennium Anatolia.

top