Classical Studies

Yurie Hong is Professor in Classical Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at Gustavus Adolphus College. Her research focuses on representations of pregnancy and childbirth in ancient Greek literature, including historical and medical texts. In particular, she is interested in examining 1) the ways that ancient women and men thought about reproduction and gender roles, 2) how they used childbirth as a metaphor to think about intellectual and cultural production, and 3) how the realities of pregnancy and birth impacted people’s identities and relationships on the ground. She has published on characterizations of the maternal-fetal relationship in ancient medical texts, teaching about gender violence in antiquity, and what motherhood might have looked like for citizen, immigrant, and enslaved women in classical Athens. 

Nandini Pandey is Associate Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. She works on Roman literature, culture, and history, their representation in contemporary media, and their potential to inform and enrich our modern lives. She’s currently writing a second book on Roman race and diversity, tentatively entitled Empire of Difference: What Rome Can Teach Us about Diversity, thanks to fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the University of Wisconsin's Institute for Research in the Humanities. Her first book, The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography (Cambridge 2018), argues that Roman writers and readers played a formative role in shaping the first emperor’s image from below. She publishes on a wide range of topics related to Roman literature, culture, and classical reception from the Renaissance through the 21st century. She also writes regularly for Eidolon, with a special focus on race and cultural appropriation in her my column “Romans Go Home.”