Notes on Contributors
Deborah Beck is Professor of Classics and Christie and Stanley E. Adams, Jr. Centennial Professor in Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research focuses on how Classical Epic poetry tells a good story that connects emotionally with its audience(s), primarily but not exclusively in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. She regularly publishes opinion essays in state and national publications in the US. With her advanced Greek students, she produces the podcast Musings in Greek Literature. Her awards include two National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships and two Plumer Visiting Research Fellowships at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
Valéry Berlincourt is a Lecturer at the University of Geneva, where he is also involved in the SNSF project Digital Statius: the Achilleid (
Thomas J. Bolt is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics and History at Lafayette College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. He specializes in the Latin poetry of the early Roman empire, with particular interests in Statius’ epics and Juvenal’s satires. He has published on computational approaches to Latin literature, especially stylometry. His philological work focuses on aesthetics in the first and second centuries CE and on the intellectual history of humor in Greco-Roman literature and culture. His current book project investigates the intersections of humor, genre, and philosophy in the Latin epic tradition.
Patrick J. Burns is Associate Research Scholar, Digital Projects at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, working in the areas of ancient world data processing and historical language text mining and analysis. Patrick earned his doctorate in Classics from Fordham University and has also held research positions in the Culture, Cognition, and Coevolution Lab at Harvard University and the Quantitative Criticism Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Patrick is the maintainer of LatinCy, pretrained natural language processing pipelines for Latin, and a co-author/developer (with David Bamman) of Latin BERT.
Ombretta Cesca Ph.D. (University of Lausanne, 2018), is Assistant Professor of Greek Language and Literature at the University of Lausanne, where she specializes in archaic and classical Greek literature. Her research interests include Homeric poetry, media and communication in Ancient Greece, and the depiction of divine and religious elements in epic poetry and drama. She is the author of the monograph Ripetizione e riformulazione nell’Iliade (De Gruyter, 2022), which explores the discursive techniques of messengers in the Iliad, analyzing their role in the transmission of information and the interplay between repetition and reformulation. Her research integrates approaches from oral theory, narratology, and history of ancient religions.
Pramit Chaudhuri is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of The War with God: Theomachy in Roman Imperial Poetry (OUP, 2014), and co-director of the Quantitative Criticism Lab (QCL), a cross-disciplinary group developing new approaches to the study of literature. QCL publications have appeared in leading venues across the humanities and sciences, including TAPA, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the Association for Computational Linguistics. His work with QCL has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Mellon Foundation.
Roberto Chiappiniello is currently Head of Classics at Downside School (UK). His primary research focus is late Latin literature, with particular interest in late antique Latin poetry, intertextuality, and reception. He has published on various aspects of late Latin poetry and intertextuality. His commentary on the Epigramma Paulini was published by De Gruyter in 2023.
Irene J.F. de Jong is emeritus professor of Ancient Greek, University of Amsterdam. She has published extensively on Homer, Herodotus, drama, and ancient narrative in general. She is the editor of a multi-volume history of ancient Greek narrative, of which five volumes have appeared so far, dealing with Narrators, narratees, and narratives, Time, Space, Characterization, and Speech (Brill). She is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy, the Norwegian Academy, the Academia Europaea, and the British Academy. Recent publications include Narratology and Classics. A Practical Guide (OUP, 2014), A narratological commentary on Herodotus Histories (CUP, 2026).
Martina Delucchi Ph.D. (Bristoll 2023), is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici in Naples, Italy. Before, she conducted research in Bristol, Vienna, and Göttingen. Her primary research interests lie in Ancient Greek and Roman culture, with a particular emphasis on the interplay between literature and art. She specializes in cross-cultural studies, the relationship between myth, politics, and society, and ancient drama. She has presented her research in both Europe and North America. Her first monograph, Imagining Telephus: A Greek Myth Across Cultures in the Ancient Mediterranean, was published by De Gruyter in 2025.
Joseph P. Dexter is a Research Assistant Professor in the Roux Institute at Northeastern University, an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Collaborative Innovation at the University of Macau, and an Associate in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. With Pramit Chaudhuri, he is the co-founder and co-director of the Quantitative Criticism Lab, an interdisciplinary digital humanities group with longstanding interests in computational approaches to classical literary criticism. His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, American Council of Learned Societies, and Poynter Foundation. Dexter holds a Ph.D. in Systems Biology from Harvard University and an A.B. in Chemistry from Princeton University.
William J. Dominik has produced a few hundred primarily in the areas of Roman literature and rhetoric, especially of the Flavian era; the classical tradition and reception; and Latin lexicography. He is presently Visiting Professor of Literary Studies at the University of Juiz de Fora; Integrated Researcher of Classical Studies at the University of Lisbon; Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Otago; and Extraordinary Professor of Ancient Studies at the University of Stellenbosch. He was also Professor of Classics at the University of Natal and has held visiting or temporary appointments at Texas Tech, Monash, Leeds, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Bahia and Oxford.
Christopher W. Forstall Ph.D. (State University of New York at Buffalo, 2014), is Associate Professor of Classics at Mount Allison University, Canada, where he teaches Greek and Latin languages and literature. His research centers on the development of computational methods for modelling the practices of ancient poets and their readers. With Walter Scheirer he is the co-author of Quantitative Intertextuality (Springer, 2019). With Damien Nelis, Neil Coffee, and Lavinia Galli Milić, he is co-editor of Intertextuality in Flavian Epic Poetry (De Gruyter, 2020). He is currently co-director of the DICES project with Berenice Verhelst.
Francesco Mambrini is a researcher at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, where he teaches Computational Linguistics, Programming for the Humanities and Linguistic Linked Data. He previously worked at the German Archaeological Institute (DAI, Berlin) and the University of Leipzig. A 2012 Joint Fellow of Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies and the DAI, he has contributed to major initiatives in Digital Classics, including the Perseus Project, iDAI.world, and the Index Thomisticus Treebank. He has annotated the syntax of Aeschylus and Sophocles for the Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebank. He was part of the ERC project LiLa: Linking Latin.
Elizabeth Minchin is Emeritus Professor of Classics at the Australian National University in Canberra. Her research focusses on the Homeric epics, which she approaches through the lenses of memory and cognition, cognitive narratology, discourse, and emotion. She has published Homer and the Resources of Memory (OUP, 2001) and Homeric Voices (OUP, 2007) and numerous articles and book chapters.
Charles W. Oughton is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Brigham Young University in Provo, UT, USA. His research focuses on intertextual and narratological analyses of the Greek and Roman historiographic traditions, especially through the works of Livy, Polybius, Plutarch, and Herodotus. He also examines the reception of the ancient world in modern narrative texts and analogue games.
Matteo Romanello is a Senior Data Engineer at the Swiss Art Research Infrastructure (SARI), University of Zurich. Previously, he was Senior Lecturer at the University of Lausanne (2020–2024), where he conducted an SNSF-funded project focused on the history of classical commentaries (Ajax Multi-Commentary). He holds a Ph.D. in Digital Humanities from King’s College London (2015) and has carried out research in national and international research projects at the intersection of humanities and computer science/NLP, including work on citation mining, information extraction (especially named entity processing), and text reuse detection.
Jeff Rydberg-Cox is Curators’ Distinguished Professor of English, Director of the Classical and Ancient Studies Program, and Co-Director of the Center for Digital and Public Humanities at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. He holds a Ph.D. from the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. He has led numerous grant-funded projects and published articles, books, and born-digital projects about computational analysis of ancient Greek and Roman literature, digitization methodologies, and artificial intelligence-based approaches to manuscript analysis. His digital projects are available online at
Rebekka Schirner studied Classics and Linguistics at the University of Mainz, where she earned her Ph.D. in 2013 with a prize-winning thesis on Augustine (Antonie Wlosok Foundation). She held visiting positions at St Andrews (2011), Notre Dame (2013), and UCL (2017/18, funded by the German Research Foundation). In 2021, she completed her habilitation on emotions—particularly fear—in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica. Since October 2025, she has been Professor of Latin Studies at the University of Jena. Her research focuses on Latin patristic literature, early medieval Latin texts, and Greek and Latin epic.
Christoph Schwameis (Ph.D. 2018) worked from 2018 until 2025 as a University Assistant at the Institut für Klassische Philologie, Mittel- und Neulatein at the University of Vienna, Austria. There, he taught translation courses and seminars on Roman literature and grammar courses on the Latin language. His research interests include Cicero’s speeches and Silius Italicus’ Punica. He has published commentaries on Cicero’s De inventione (2014), Cicero’s De praetura Siciliensi (2019), and books 15 and 16 of the Punica (2025).
Bernhard Söllradl is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Salzburg, where he carries out his project Configurations of Genre in Flavian Epic Poetry (FWF grant ESP 429-G). His monograph on the interplay of myth, politics, and ideology in Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, Valerius Flaccus, Vespasian und die Argo: zur zeithistorischen Perspektivierung des Mythos in den Argonautica (2023) was published in Brill’s Mnemosyne Supplements series (originally a 2021 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Vienna). He is co-editor of Gattungstheorie und Dichtungspraxis in neronisch-flavischer Epik (2024), a volume in the De Gruyter series Millennium Studies, and editor of a partial edition (text and translation with introduction and notes) of John Lesley’s De origine, moribus, et rebus gestis Scotorum (2020). His research interests include Flavian epic, genre theory, intertextuality, metapoetics, and Neo-Latin.
Jan Telg genannt Kortmann is currently assistant professor of Latin Literature at the University of Münster. He has published a commentary on the Hannibal ad portas scene in Silius Italicus’ Punica (2018) and further articles on Roman epic. At the moment, he is working on the publication of his habilitation thesis analyzing the narrative function of walls in Roman literature. His research interests particularly focus on Roman epic, historiography, elegy and narratology.
Melissande Tomcik Ph.D. (Geneva, 2021), is assistant professor of Latin language and literature at the University of Montreal. Her research interests include myth, intertextuality and metapoetics. Her current projects focus on the relationship between fact and fiction in ancient literature. In particular, she is working on a book project devoted to fake news in Flavian epic. In 2025 she launched a research project investigating false promises and misleading prophecies in the epics of Valerius Flaccus, Statius and Silius Italicus.
Berenice Verhelst Ph.D. (University of Ghent, 2014), is assistant professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam. She has published extensively on late antique poetry, especially Nonnus of Panopolis, the epyllia of the so-called “school of Nonnus” and Aelia Eudocia. With Christopher Forstall she co-directs the DICES project (Digital Initative for Classics: Epic Speeches). She is interested in the diachrony of the epic tradition, especially with respect to the representation of speech as a narratological feature and a means of characterization, as is reflected in her 2017 monograph Direct Speech in Nonnus’ Dionysiaca (Brill).