
Sinead Brennan-McMahon
Hello! I'm Sinead. I study sexuality in ancient Roman culture, and my long-term goal is to improve queer representation in Classics classrooms. I center Digital Humanities and Data Science techniques in my research and teaching.
My current project, Landscapes of Sexuality, is a study of how regular Roman people interacted with nude and sexual art in their everyday lives, what it meant to them, and how they used visual and literary motifs to better understand their environment. I have found tentative evidence for a queer neighborhood in Pompeii, Italy, by studying the art that museums used to censor, in terms of what it looked like and where it was displayed. I am comparing this evidence to literary accounts of non-traditional familial units. I expect to complete a first draft in late 2024.
In a previous project, Expurgating Martial: Erasing Homosexuality from Anglophone Editions and Commentaries, 1800–2017, I comprehensively studied the reception of Martial’s sexually obscene homosexual epigrams in school texts and commentaries. With a statistical analysis, I found that Victorian editors of Martial’s Epigrams expurgated the text to remove references to material they found offensive and to curate a culturally appropriate view of the ancient world for their schoolboy readers.
I also have research interests in Digital Humanities, Data Science and programming. As a CESTA DH Graduate Fellow (2023), I developed an ngram viewer tool for the Latin literary canon, to show how the frequency of different Latin words (lemmata) changed over time. I am collaborating on a project with the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae to solve the problem of accurate lemmatisation for the Latin canon, which I aim to complete in 2025. As a Data Science Scholar (2024-25), I am also developing a map of Pompeii that differentiates space by who could access it, based on people's intersecting social positionalities, to visualize my queer neighborhood project.
I teach Latin and Greek at Stanford, and I have a pedagogical interest in neurodiversity in the ancient language classroom. Although neurodiversity has been well studied in the context of modern language teaching, the traditional grammar-translation teaching method for ancient languages lacks the writing, speaking and listening components, which instructors often leverage to support neurodivergent students. I am currently working on a paper on best practices for teaching Latin to students with ADHD, and how instructors can support them in grammar-translation, comprehensible input (CI) and spoken Latin classes.
I'm originally from Aotearoa New Zealand, from an Irish and Pākehā family.