Current Grad Students in Classics

Kate Barnes

Kate is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. Her scholarly interests include later Latin poetry (from Lucan to Sedulius). In her work, she focuses on depictions of bodies in poetry as well as the inheritance of Classics within Late Antiquity. She received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 2017 with a thesis entitled “The Anthropophagic Epic: Cannibalism, Poetics, and the Poet(s) of Statius’ Thebaid.” Her interests also include the inheritance of classics and the materiality of reading, and in the fall of 2021, she was curator of an exhibit at Bryn Mawr entitled “Private Lives of Old Books.” She is currently working on her dissertation while teaching Latin at Hackley School.

Dianne Boetsch

Dianne is a Ph.D. candidate in Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. Her areas of interest include later Latin epic and Greek tragedy. She is writing her dissertation on the influence of Greek tragedy on Statius' Thebaid under the direction of Prof. Annette Baertschi. She grew up in the gloriously rainy and caffeinated state of Washington, where she received her B.A. in Classics and English from Whitman College in 2007, and then went on to receive her M.A. in Classical Studies from Indiana University in 2009 and her M.A. in Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies from Bryn Mawr College in 2011 with a thesis entitled "From Hell and Back: Crossing Boundaries in Claudian's De Raptu Proserpinae." She was an associate instructor for a course in Ancient Civilization at Indiana University and she has taught Latin more locally at Bryn Mawr College, The Agnes Irwin School, and Ursinus College. She has presented her research at various venues including Bryn Mawr's Graduate Group Symposium, CAMWS, the Indiana Classical Conference, and the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest, where the topics have inspired cheerful discussion on the merits of deoculation, the ambiguously (un)dead, unrepentant puns, and transferred epithets. 

Harriet Evans

Harriet is a first year M.A. student in the Department of Greek, Latin and Classical Studies. She graduated from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2020 with a B.A. in Classics. Her interests include Latin poetry of the late Republic and early Empire, particularly relating to the bucolic genre and ideas surrounding the cosmos.

Mallory Fitzpatrick

Mallory received her B.A. in classical languages from John Carroll University in 2019, with a second major in Professional Writing. In 2022 she received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College with a thesis entitled “Beyond Augustus as Aeneas: Parallels between Ascanius and Octavian in Vergil’s Aeneid.” Her other research interests include the supernatural in the ancient world, Greek epic and tragedy, Roman satire, and Greek pottery. She has also worked with Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections on a number of projects and remains deeply interested in the material culture of the classics, from archaeology to incunabula.  

Stella Fritzell

Stella J. Fritzell is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies.  She received her B.A. in Classical Studies and Music from Carleton College in 2015, and an M.A. in Classical Studies from Bryn Mawr College in 2019 with a thesis entitled “Atalanta as a Repoussoir for Erotic & Competitive Ephebic Excellence”.  Her dissertation investigates how myth is experienced as a cultural commodity that contributes to the definition of local identities.  Stella’s research interests broadly include mythology, Digital Scholarship, narratology, and landscape theory.  In addition to her research, Stella tutors Greek and Latin, and teaches Doshinkan Aikido, in which she currently holds the rank of Nidan Black Belt.

Rey George

Rey George is a first year M.A. student in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. She received her B.A. in Classical Civilization from the University of Michigan in 2018 and her M.A. in Classical Studies from McGill University in 2020. Her research interests include ancient notions of cosmology, linguistic portrayals of the soul in poetry and prose, narratives of metaphysical motion, and the role of divinity in ancient conceptions of psychology.

Jenni Glaser

Olivia Hopewell

Olivia received her B.A. from Augustana University in 2015, majoring in Classics and Philosophy. She received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 2019, with a thesis entitled "Seeking the Self in the Sentence: Reconsidering the ethical reception of autobiography with two case studies from Late Antiquity." This project applied a Levinasian phenomenological framework to the reception of the autobiographical genre, focusing on Augustine's Confessions and Dhouda's Liber Manualis. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate whose research interests include Plato, ancient Philosophy, ethics, theory, and feminism. 

Michael Kriege

Michael Kriege is a first year M.A. student in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. He received his B.A. in Classical Studies from the University of Chicago in 2018. In 2020 he completed a post-baccalaureate program in Classics at UCLA. He is interested in ancient magic and religion and how authors interact with it in their texts.

Devin Lawson

Devin is a Ph.D. student in the department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. She received her B.A. in Mathematics with a minor in Classical Studies from Coe College in 2019 and her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 2022 with a thesis entitled "Dismembered According to the Rigor of Harmony: A Structuralist Reading of Zosimos' Visions." Her research interests include epistolography, ancient religion and magic, late antiquity, and the archaeology of the Bay of Naples.

Seth Levin

Seth is a first year M.A. student in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. He graduated from Dickinson College in 2019 with a B.A. in Classical Studies, and wrote his honors thesis concerning Caesar’s narratology in his Commentaries. His academic interests include historiography, satire and comedy, and epic.

Kristen Patterson

Kristen is pursuing her M.A. in Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. She received a B.A. in classical studies with a minor in art history from Willamette University in 2016. She then attended the Post-Baccalaureate program in classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include myth, Homeric epic, Greek tragedy, and ancient Greek and Roman gender and sexuality.

Dalton Sala

Dalton Sala is a second-year M.A. student and Latin TA in the Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. He received his B.A. in Latin from Hillsdale College in 2020. His primary research interests include Greek and Latin bucolic, Roman rhetoric, and later Latin authors.

Mary Somerville

Mary is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. She received her B.A. in Latin in 2015 from Wake Forest University. She received her M.A. from Bryn Mawr College in 2017 with a thesis entitled "Seditio and Civil War: Mutiny and Loyalty in Lucan's Pharsalia." Her dissertation investigates depictions of male tears in the early Roman empire, attempting to locate crying behaviors within a larger cultural framework of gendered values. Her other research interests include Greek and Latin epic poetry, Roman satire, and ancient religion.

Sophia Ophelia L. Tobár

Sophia is currently a first-year M.A. student in the department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. She completed her B.A. at CUNY Hunter College with a double major in Greek & Latin and Anthropology. Her area of research centers on the construction of Ancient ethnic groups within Greek Literature and their lasting echoes in the modern era, particularly in the Ancient Near East. She is particularly interested in Greek Tragedy, Hellenistic Poetry, and the Greek and Latin Novels

Audrey Wallace

Audrey Wallace is pursuing a Ph.D. in the department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies. She received a B.A. in ancient Greek from Oberlin College in 2012, and an M.A. in classical studies from Bryn Mawr in 2017, with a thesis titled "Defending the Indefensible: The Case(s) for Helen of Troy." Her research interests include rhetoric, education, audience, philosophy, and sophistry, particularly in the dialogues of Plato.