Department accomplishments

Department Accomplishments

Publications 

Alison Keith 

Congratulations to Alison Keith on the publication of her latest book, Sulpicia: Life, Love, and Literature in Ancient Rome. This is the first full-length biography of Sulpicia, the earliest extant female author of classical Latin poetry. Unmentioned by her contemporaries, Sulpicia belonged to the pinnacle of the Roman aristocracy and wrote openly about her life and love affair in the same literary forms as Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus. This study investigates Sulpicia's family background, the societal expectations for a woman of her aristocratic rank, and the literary ferment that swept Rome in her day and to which she contributed. 

Jonathan Burgess 

Congratulations to Jonathan Burgess on the publication of his latest book! The Travels of Odysseus employs the theme of travel to explore the Odyssey and its contexts. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 provides analysis of the “wanderings” or Apologos of Odysseus, Chapter 3 explores the “lying tales” told by Odysseus in disguise upon his return to Ithaca, and Chapter 4 discusses a variety of stories about Odysseus leaving Ithaca again (including Teiresias' prediction of an “inland journey” and the Telegony of the Epic Cycle). 

Christer Bruun 

Congratulations to Christer Bruun on the publication of his major new study of Ostia-by-the Sea, now available from Oxford University Press! Ostia, the Roman settlement founded at the mouth of the river Tiber, was the port of the imperial capital and one of the most important urban centers in the Mediterranean world during the last decades of the Roman Republic and the Early and High Empires. The town's role as a maritime mercantile hub explains why, in its heyday, it was Italy's largest town after the mighty Rome. Ostia is still important today, but now because of the impressive remains of its buildings, inscriptions, and even more numerous archaeological objects and what they can tell us about the people who lived there, or merely visited, or those whose ships anchored in one of Ostia's harbors. 

Plebeian Volume XII 

The twelfth annual volume of Plebeian, the journal of the Classics Student Union is now available online, showcasing some of the amazing research done by our student community: 

• Olivia Pontecorvo: Christianizing the Classics: the Evolution of Dante’s Personification of Love in the Vita Nuova 

• Yulia Tsz Yau Wong: Myth and Function: Viewer Engagement Through an Etruscan Bronze Mirror and The Sleeping Hermaphrodite 

• Elisa Kogan Penha: The Woman's Voice in Juvenal's Satire 6 and Tacitus' Germania 

• Eli Vodarek-Berman: Imagery and History in Two Passages of Ammianus Marcellinus 

• Raquel Lewin: Speech and Blame in Arrian’s Anabasis 

• Cass Aalbers-Davey: Unwedding, Unveiling, Undoing: Marriage to Death and Female Homoeroticism in Euripides’ Medea 

• Jenna Guadagna: Effeminate Hephaistos: Gender and Power in the Birth and Return of Hephaistos 

Defences 

Taylor Stark 

Congratulations to Taylor Stark, who on April 13 successfully defended his PhD thesis on "The Smith and the State: Relationships Between Metal Production and the Mycenaean Palaces in the Late Bronze Age Aegean"! Congratulations too to his supervisor, Prof. Sarah Murray; and our thanks to his external examiner, Prof. Dimitri Nakassis. 

Claudia Paparella 

Congratulations to Claudia Paparella, who completed her PhD on Monday, February 23, with a defence of her thesis on “Language and Identities in the Making of Roman Italy”. Congratulations too to Seth Bernard, her supervisor! 

Jackson Hase 

Congratulations to Jackson Hase, who completed his PhD on Monday, March 2, with a defence of his thesis on “Forged, Supressed, Corrupted, and Burned: Letters and Miscommunications in Late Antiquity”. Congratulations too to Kevin Wilkinson, his supervisor! 

Awards 

Seth Bernard 

Congratulation to Prof. Seth Bernard, who secured a SSHRC Connection Grant to support a major conference on slavery in the ancient and medieval Mediterranean worlds,which was held at the University of Toronto in April 2026! 

Slavery is a major theme of historical studies, an awful but near ubiquitous institution, which contributed to our modern world but has been present across most of human history. Within substantial scholarly interest on the topic of slavery in ancient and medieval societies, we find that *slaving* presents a nearly unexplored theme—slavingintends to refer to the various processes by which people were taken and transformed into commodities and forcibly moved to places of enslavement (Miller 2012). By contrast to slavery in action, the wider concept of slaving has seen far less attention in scholarship on premodern history, and this gap has resulted in a narrow understanding of slavery’s societal impacts. By focusing on slaving, this conference hopes to expand knowledge of past slavery to encompass not only slave-owning societies themselves, but the communities from which slaves were taken, the agents who enslaved and moved them, and the routes and modes of their enslavement. 
  
In addressing this gap, moreover, this conference also promotes the possibilities of new, interdisciplinary methodologies for studying slavery. The event brings together an international group of experts from diverse backgrounds and career stages including historians, epigraphers, archaeologists, and genetic scientists. The event recognizes the extraordinary relevance to the study of slaving of a particular moment of discovery in terms of new archaeological evidence, new historical tools, and especially new genetic science. To our knowledge, the event will be the first in Canada to bring genetic scientists and historical researchers together to think about ancient and medieval Mediterranean slavery. There is urgency to this conversation, as a flood of new research considers the genetic makeup of past populations but does not yet to account for slaving as a factor in creating genetic diversity and contributing to premodern human mobility. This disconnect greatly contrasts, for example, the study of modern Transatlantic slavery, where genetic science leads to important breakthroughs in understanding the source and impacts of slave-trading. By integrating new approaches to ancient and medieval slaving, we will create new knowledge on the topic, while our unique assemblage of scholars will form a new network and pave the way for future collaborative research on the topic, combining multiple methodologies.  

Katherine Blouin 

Congratulations to our UTSC colleague and graduate faculty member Katherine Blouin, who has been promoted to Professor! Katherine works on socio-economic and environmental history, with a focus on ancient, and particularly Roman, Egypt, as well as on the ethics and (de)colonial entailments of Antiquity-related fields; her recent publications include The Nile Delta: Histories from Antiquity to the Modern Period (Cambridge University Press, 2024), and the Routledge Handbook of Classics and Postcolonial Theory, co-edited with Ben Akrigg. This year, she has been a Fellow at the Jackman Humanities Institute: you can read about her project here. 

Martin Revermann 

Congratulations to Martin Revermann, who has won a 6-Month Faculty Research Fellowship at the JHI for 2026/27! His project there is The Theatre of Science: Exploring the Interfaces between Science, Theatre and Performance Art. You can read more about this, and the other fellows, here. 

Victoria Wohl 

We are delighted to learn that Victoria Wohl is one of the 2025 winners of a Dean’s Research Excellence Award! These awards celebrate outstanding and influential scholarship across the Faculty of Arts & Science and recognize scholars whose work has made a lasting impact in their fields. Congratulations Victoria! 

Victoria Wohl is a distinguished professor in the Department of Classics, and one of the world’s leading scholars of ancient Greek literature. Her research spans a variety of genres and discourses and focuses in particular on the social relations, political thought, and psychic life of democratic Athens. Wohl has published work reflecting 900 years of Greek literature, encompassing genres such as tragedy, comedy, oratory, historiography and philosophy. She has consistently forged connections between antiquity and modernity, asserting that the field of classics has much to contribute to modern discussions. The author of numerous published works, she recently completed a book on the poetics of the Presocratic philosophers. 

On November 14, Victoria Wohl will be inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. This high honour recognizes her pioneering work pioneering work on Greek drama, historiography, law, and, most recently, the Presocratics. 
Victoria is our second current FRSC, alongside Alison Keith. Congratulations Victoria! 

Kate Cooper 

Congratulations to Dr Kate Cooper, who has been appointed the inaugural Nick Mirkopoulos Associate Curator of Ancient Greece & Rome at the Royal Ontario Museum! Kate has taught for the Department in the past and has been working with us and others in the University as part of the ROMKOMMA project on the ROM’s collection of ancient Greek coins. We are very much looking forward to the new opportunities for collaboration her appointment to this permanent position will bring!  

Read more about Kate’s appointment here: https://www.rom.on.ca/news-releases/rom-appoints-kate-cooper-first-nick-mirkopoulos-associate-curator-ancient-greece-rome. 

Kenneth Yu 

Congratulations to Kenneth Yu, who was a recipient of the 2025/2026 Getty Scholars Program fellowship! He was part of the Getty Villa Scholars group, whose theme is "Religious Experience in Antiquity," and was working in Los Angeles January to March of 2026.  

Professor Yu's project is titled "Manufacturing the Divine: Technê and the Phenomenology of Wonder in Hellenistic and Imperial Greece." A short description is included below: 

"This project builds on my longstanding interest in ancient Greek thaumatology (descriptions and theorizations of wonders and marvels). It explores how burgeoning pictorial, craft, and technological traditions in the Hellenistic and Roman Empires enabled new practices of wonder making that expanded Greek religious imaginaries and engendered novel modes of sensing the gods. Focusing on the intersection of the literary and material dimensions of wonder, the project uncovers the distinctive aesthetic and affective idiom for apprehending and reflecting on the divine in the post-Classical period." 

Read more about the program and the other invited scholars on the Getty Research Institute's website. 

Luke Lomax 

Our warmest congratulations to Luke Lomax, Co-President of the Classics student society, CLASSU, one of this year's recipients of the Arts & Science Student Union Katharine Ball Graduating Award for Course Unions! 

This award is to give recognition for Executive Members of Course Unions who are in their graduating year: winners of this award in the past have demonstrated their involvement with their course union above and beyond what is generally expected of an Executive member. 

Before becoming Co-President of CLASSU this year, Luke was Treasurer, and before that a member of the Executive. He has been an Associate Editor of our undergraduate journal, Plebeian, and was one of the forces behind the massively successful Ancient Food Day. It is great to see the incredible energy, imagination and enthusiasm of our student society and its leadership recognised in Luke! 

Undergraduates 

Congratulations to all of the following – this year’s prize-winning undergraduates! They include recipients of a new award we have instituted: the Language Achievement Award, given for outstanding performance in Beginners and Intermediate Greek and Latin. This new award is another way of recognising the brilliance of our undergraduates, as well a means of highlighting our strong commitment to the languages. 

Chau/Chan Scholarship in Classics 

• Daniel Featherby 

Chau Family Undergraduate Scholarship in Classics 

• Sophie Stankovic 

C. B. Farrar Undergraduate Scholarship in Classics 

• Adelaide Sale 

Graham Campbell Fellowship in Memory of Maurice Hutton in Classics 

• Tallulah Valliere-Paul 

W. B. Wiegand Prize in Ancient Greek 

• Abdullah Zafar 

Dorothy Ellison Scholarship in Latin 

• Katie McBain 

Dorothy Ellison Graduating Scholarship in Latin 

• John Weachter 

Eric Trevor Owen Scholarship in Greek 

• Abdullah Zafar 

Ancient Greek History Undergraduate Awards 

• Tessa Delaney-Girotta 

• Piper Hays 

• John Reilly 

• Tallulah Valliere-Paul 

All Souls Historical Essay Scholarship in Ancient History 

• Kate Levey 

Department of Classics Language Achievement Awards 

• Sarah Beke 

• Nathan DeBoer 

• Arden Julian 

• Emily Kocot 

• Kate Levey 

• Lex Veldhuizen-Martul 

• Phoebe Sozou 

• Eli Vodarek-Berman 

Congratulations also to the following undergraduates: winners of this year’s Classical Association of Canada’s Sight Translation Contest! We are thrilled to have our talented undergraduates representing the Department and showcasing the strength of our language program. Well done to everyone! 

Junior Greek 

First prize: Raghav Gambir 

Senior Greek 

First prize: Daniel Featherby 

Third prize: Eli Vodarek-Berman 

Senior Latin 

First prize: Daniel Featherby 

Second prize: Eli Vodarek-Berman 

Conference Presentations 

The Department also made a strong showing at this year’s Classical Association of Canada Annual General Meeting, held from May 4-6, in Kingston. 21 members of the Department presented their research to their colleagues from Canada and abroad. Congratulations to all!