Radical Re-Imaginings: Classics for the 21st Century — Symposium Schedule and Participants

On Friday and Saturday, September 5th and 6th, renowned scholars of the ancient world will join Brooklyn Institute for Social Research for Radical Re-Imaginings: Classics for the 21st Century — a Symposium. Across a series of four panels, we will ask: how can we understand the various violences—epistemic, political, and material—in which the history of Classics is complicit? What would it take to radically reimagine the discipline, in theory and in practice? How might a reconfigured field—reframed, retheorized, and repoliticized—help us to navigate our own present of political crisis and savage reaction?

The schedule of events is below. Participant biographies will be shortly forthcoming. “Radical Re-Imaginings,” made possible by grants from the Society for Classical Studies and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, will take place at BISR Central (68 Jay Street #425 in DUMBO, Brooklyn) and is free to attend and open to the public. For more information and to RSVP, please visit the event page.

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE

Friday, September 5th

7:00pm: Welcome and Opening Remarks

7:15-9:15pm: Opening Panel: Forget the Classics?
Featuring Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Mathura Umachandran, Del A. Maticic, Erin Petrella, Hannah Silverblank, and Bruce King

9:15pm: Wine Reception

Saturday, September 6th

10:30am: Coffee and Bagels

11:00-1:00pm: Panel: The Politics of Translation
Featuring Emily Wilson, Lynn Kozak, James Redfield, Huda Fakhreddine, and Lauren K. Wolfe

1:45-3:45pm: Panel: The Question of Comparison
Featuring Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani, Mathura Umachandran, Kate Meng Brassel, Nancy Worman, and Laura Slatkin

4:15-6:15pm: Panel: Doing Classics in Dark Times
Featuring Brooke Holmes, Marchella Ward, Donna Zuckerberg, Curtis Dozier, and Bruce King

PARTICIPANTS

Kate Meng Brassel
Kate Meng Brassel is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her current scholarly work includes a forthcoming monograph on Roman satire, a separate investigation into the history of material texts and disciplinary formation, and projects in Asian studies and critical theory. She has been a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a member of the steering committee of the Asian and Asian American Classical Committee; currently she is active in the Society for Classical Studies Committee on Translation, as well as on the Penn Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies executive board.

Curtis Dozier
Curtis Dozier teaches Greek and Roman Studies at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, and is the director of Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics, a website that documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups. His book on this topic, The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate, will be published by Yale University Press in January.  

Huda Fakhreddine
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice, and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry. Among her translations are Lighthouse for the Drowning, The Sky That Denied Me: Selections from Jawdat Fakhreddine, The Universe, All at Once: Selections from Salim Barakat, and Palestinian: Four Poems by Ibrahim Nasrallah. Her creative work includes a book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghir taht shams thaniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun), and the forthcoming Wa min thamma al-alam (And then the World). Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Protean, Lithub, Words Without Borders, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures, among many others.  She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and section editor of the Encyclopedia of Islam.

Brooke Holmes
Brooke Holmes teaches in the Department of Classics at Princeton University, where she also directs the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy, as well as the co-editor of six volumes—most recently, with Nida Ghouse, Coming to Know. From 2012-2020 she was the PI for the project “Postclassicisms” at Princeton and co-authored Postclassicisms.  She has co-curated the book and installation project “Liquid Antiquity” and often collaborates with artists and curators, most recently with Isabel Lewis on her work “Walking Spirals: An Occasion to Consider Other Ways of Getting to Know This River”.  She is near completion of her book Sympathy and the Tissue of the World: Life, Community, and Nature in the Ancient Mediterranean.

Bruce M. King
Bruce M. King teaches and writes about the ancient world, especially Homeric poetry and the literature and philosophy of the archaic and classical periods. He received his PhD from the University of Chicago and has held fellowships from the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, the Center for Hellenic Studies, Vassar College (the Blegen fellowship), and the Reid Hall Center for Scholars in Paris. He is currently completing a book on the Iliad, provisionally entitled Akhilleus All-Unheroic. Bruce is the Program Head for BISR Language Learning and Critique.

Lynn Kozak
Lynn Kozak is Associate Professor in History and Classical Studies and an associate faculty member in English at McGill University, with research interests in ancient Greek literature and its receptions, performance, queer studies, media studies, and horror studies. They are the author of Experiencing Hektor: Character in the Iliad, the co-editor (with Miranda Hickman) of The Classics in Modernist Translation, and the editor of Scapegoat Carnivale’s Tragic Trilogy: Euripides’ Medea and Bacchae, Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus; they have also published several chapters and articles on horror television and television poetics. In 2018, they performed a new serial translation of the whole Iliad in a Montréal bar (Previously on the Iliad). Current research  and research-creation explores the connections between Greek tragedy and contemporary horror media.

Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani
Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani is a PhD Student in Classics and MA student in Philosophy at Brown University. He received his MA in Classics at The Graduate Center, CUNY and an AB in Philosophy from Bryn Mawr College. His interests include ancient Greek metaphysics and epistemology, comparative ancient Greek and South Asian philosophy, and the reception of Plato in South and Southeast Asian political thought. His writing has appeared in the Routledge volume, Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics, as well as Eidolon and the Society for Classical Studies’ Professional Blog.

Del A. Maticic
Del A Maticic is part of the English Faculty at the School of the Holy Child in Rye, NY. He has a PhD in Classics from NYU and spent three years teaching at Vassar. He has written about problems of environment, materiality, and labor in Republican and Imperial Latin literature. In 2024, he, along with Jordan Rogers, published an edited volume called Working Lives in Ancient Rome with Palgrave MacMillan. Prior to leaving academia, he was preparing a second book tentatively entitled Roman Pessimism, which explored the role that Latin literature played in the history of philosophical and cultural pessimism.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta
Dan-el Padilla Peralta is Associate Professor of Classics, and associated faculty in African American Studies and affiliated faculty in the Programs of Latino Studies and Latin American Studies, at Princeton University. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League and Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic; and he has co-edited Rome, Empire of Plunder: The Dynamics of Cultural Appropriation and Making the Middle Republic: New Approaches to Rome and Italy, c. 400 – 200 BCE. His next book is entitled Classicism and Other Phobias.

Erin Petrella
Erin Petrella received her PhD in Classics from Columbia University. Her research focuses on the history and development of botanical Latin, the scientific ideal of universal intelligibility, and textual authenticity. She has a prior MLS in Rare Books Librarianship and has worked for several years with Columbia’s Justice-in-Education program.

James Redfield
James Adam Redfield is assistant professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University and visiting associate professor in Jewish and European Civilization at the University of Chicago. He writes mainly on rabbinic literature, with a focus on rabbinic theories of law and culture, ethnography, travel, and narrative. His monograph, Adventures of Rabbah & Friends: The Talmud’s Strange Tales and their Afterlife, appeared in 2025 with Brown University Press, and Talmud /and/ Philosophy (ed. with Sergey Dolgopolski) with Indiana University Press in 2024. His edition and translation of the Yiddish writings of M.Y. Berdichevsky, From a Distant Relation, appeared with Syracuse University Press in 2021.

Hannah Silverblank
Hannah Silverblank (she/her) is a writer, an independent scholar, a practicing diviner, and a caretaker for people, plants, and animals. Inspired by Hekate’s three faces—maiden, mother, crone—her craft unfolds in three modes: scholar, mystic, and storyteller. These entangled modes of creative interpretation operate symbiotically, and through this braided practice she reads and writes about magic, myth, translation, reception, astrology, queerness, and disability. Her research interrogates modern revivals of Hellenistic astrology and translations of ancient Greek astrological treatises and esoteric poetry, and she weaves these research areas into her speculative composting of ancient practices in the fertile soils of fiction and divination. You can find her published scholarly writing on disability and queerness in Greek literature in Critical Ancient World Studies, Classical Receptions Journal, The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory, among other venues. You can read her astrological essays on her Substack (“The Trickster’s Almanac”), and you can learn more about her divinatory practice on her website (www.hannahsilverblank.com).

Laura Slatkin
Laura Slatkin received her BA and PhD in Classics from Harvard University and her MA. from Cambridge University.  Her research and teaching interests include ancient Greek and Roman poetry, as well as wisdom traditions in classical and Near Eastern antiquity and anthropological approaches to the literature of the ancient Mediterranean world.  She has published on archaic and classical Greek epic and drama, including The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays. She teaches at NYU’s Gallatin School and is Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago.

Mathura Umachandran
Mathura (she/they) is a child of the Tamil Eelam diaspora, born and raised in London and its Essex suburbs. Since 2022, they have been a lecturer in the department of Classics, Ancient History, Religious Studies and Theology at the University of Exeter, UK. Holding degrees from Wadham College Oxford (BA, Literae Humaniores 2009), University College London (MA Reception of the Ancient World 2011) and Princeton University (PhD Classics 2018), they have also held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Oxford and Cornell University. While in post at Exeter, they have co-stewarded the Critical Ancient World Studies collective with Marchella Ward and co-founded the Society for the Study of the Past, as well as taught courses such as ‘Ancient Racecraft’ following the implications of Barbara and Karen Fields’ 2012 critique of race for ancient world studies, and ‘Critical Classics and the Contemporary World’ that introduces undergraduates to classical reception keyed to other-than-celebratory modes. Until recently, they were co-officer for Membership and Recruitment officer for the Exeter branch of the University and College Union.

Emily Wilson
Emily Wilson is Department Chair and Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. Wilson attended Oxford University (Balliol College B.A. in Classics and Corpus Christi College M.Phil. in Renaissance English Literature) and Yale University (Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature). She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance & Early Modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She has published three monographs and numerous essays about ancient literature and its later receptions, and verse translations of the Iliad, the Odyssey, Euripides, Sophocles, and Seneca. She lives in Philadelphia.

Marchella Ward
Marchella Ward (“Chella”) is Lecturer in Classical Studies at the Open University. She is the author of Blindness and Spectatorship in Ancient and Modern Theatres: Towards New Ways of Looking and Looking Back and the co-editor, with Mathura Umachandran, of Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics. She writes frequently for non-specialists and also writes for children, is the co-host of the Radio ReOrient podcast on Muslimness, post-orientalism, and decoloniality, and is also a founding member of the Society for the Study of the Past, a subject organization for doing history in solidarity with the occupied and the oppressed. She is currently writing a book on the Islamophobia of Classicism.

Lauren K. Wolfe
Lauren K. Wolfe (she/her) is Associate Faculty and Program Director at Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She received her PhD from New York University, her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her BA from Grinnell College. Her interests are in 20th and 21st century Austrian and German literature and the practice and theory of translation. A working translator, she is a founding editor of Barricade—A Journal of Antifascism and Translation; her translations have been published by Dalkey Archive Press, University of Minnesota Press, MIT Press, Review of Contemporary Fiction, and elsewhere.

Nancy Worman
Nancy Worman is Professor of Classics at Barnard College and Columbia University. She is affiliated with the Barnard Program in Comparative Literature and the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on style and the body in performance in classical Greek drama and its reception, as well as rhetoric and ancient and modern literary theory and criticism. She has published books and articles on these topics, including Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism, Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy, and Tragic Bodies: Edges of the Human in Greek Drama, which won the 2022 PROSE Award for Classics. Her forthcoming book Bodies of Theory is focused on embodiment in ancient and modern literary theory and she is currently working on feminist receptions of ancient literature.

Donna Zuckerberg
Donna Zuckerberg is the author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age. She got her PhD in Classics from Princeton and was the founder and editor-in-chief of the publication Eidolon from 2015-2020. Her writing has been published in both academic and mainstream publications including the Washington Post, BBC.com, and Jezebel. Her memoir, Antiquated, will be published by Simon & Schuster in 2027. She currently writes a newsletter called Myth Takes and lives in the Bay Area with her partner, three kids, and elderly bulldog.