Early Career Visiting Fellows
About
Early Career Fellows are invited to Stanford by the core faculty of the Classics Department. The invitation is extended to an outstanding young scholar within ten years of receiving his or her PhD. Each year, the appointment rotates to a different sub-disipline in Classics. This fellowship has been created to acknowledge classicists who are most likely to shape the future of our discipline.
During appointments, Early Career Fellows spend a month on campus to conduct research, collaborate with faculty and students, and oversee graduate workshops, culminating in an evening lecture and presentation of research.
Early Career Fellow Biographies
2018-2019 Benjamin Russell (Classical Archaeology)
Benjamin Russell took a BA in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, followed by the MSt and DPhil in Classical Archaeology at the University of Oxford. His doctoral work, which he finished in 2009, was on the Roman stone trade and was completed as part of the wider Oxford Roman Economy Project. Between 2009 and 2010 he worked on a post-doctoral project at the British School at Rome, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, on the Roman sarcophagus trade. In 2010-2011 he worked as a Teaching Assistant in Classical Archaeology at St John’s College in the University of Oxford and lectured both there and at Birkbeck (University of London) on Roman and Hellenistic art, architecture and archaeology. Between 2011 and 2013, he was a Research Associate on a Leverhulme-funded project on Roman sculptural techniques at King’s College London (The Art of Making in Antiquity). Russell joined the Classics department in Edinburgh in 2013 as Lecturer in Classical Archaeology and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2017. He visited us in April 2019, giving a lecture at the Stanford Archaeology Center, one in our department, and co-chaired an all-day workshop on marble carving with Prof. Justin Leidwanger.
2016-17 Isabelle Torrance (Language and Literature)
Isabelle Torrance (Ph.D. Trinity College, 2004) visited the Department as an Early Career Fellow for February and March of 2017. Torrance, of Aarhus University, focuses on archaic and classical Greek literature and culture, and is particularly interested in Greek tragedy and the later reception of classical myth. Her previous publications include books on Euripides, Aeschylus, and the power of oaths in ancient Greek culture. Forthcoming are another volume on Euripides and a project linking Greek tragedy and Irish politics.
2015-16 - Michael Squire (Classical Art)
Michael Squire (Ph.D. Trinity College, 2006) was in residence from January through early February 2016. He specializes in Graeco-Roman visual culture, the history of aesthetics, and representations of the body in Greek and Roman art. He is currently Reader at King's College, London. While at Stanford he received the honor of giving the fifth annual Herbert W. Benario lecture in Roman Studies at Emory University: "Troy Story: Miniaturizing Epic in Roman Art" on January 21, 2016. In addition, he gave a research talk in our department on January 25, 2016 entitled “How to read a Roman portrait’? Optatian and the face of Constantine" which brought together two research themes: on the one hand, the ‘semantic’ workings of Roman portraits (signa); and on the other the unloved and overlooked ‘picture-poems’ of Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius (writing in the first decades of the fourth century A.D.).
2014-15 - Kyle Harper (Ancient History)
Kyle Harper (Ph.D. Harvard University, 2007) visited the Department from the University of Oklahoma. He researches the social and economic history of the Roman Empire and early Middle Ages. His current work delves into the historical impact of climate change and disease. He presented his research during an evening talk on May 13, 2015 entitled "The Environmental Fall of the Roman Empire". This lecture explored how the intersection of ancient history and the natural sciences is illuminating the importance of environmental change in the ancient world. How will historians of late antiquity reckon with the growing evidence that climate change and pandemic disease were major shapers of the social, economic, and demographic history of the Mediterranean?
Inaugural Fellow 2013-14 - Jackie Elliott (Language and Literature)
Stanford's inaugural Early Career Fellow, Jackie Elliott (Ph.D. Columbia, 2005) specializes in the history of Latin literature. While visiting the Department, she delivered a talk entitled "Re-centering Rome: Cosmology, Divine Intervention, and the Operation of the Natural World in Ennius' Poetic History." She also organized a graduate seminar on early Roman epic. She is currently an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Her monograph, Ennius and the Architecture of the Annales, was published by Cambridge University Press in November 2013.