The Master’s in Classical Studies program is housed in the Classics Department and is taught by select faculty in the Classics, History, and Art History departments. Our faculty members represent a wide range of interests, among them Latin literature of the Augustan and Silver Age period, the ancient novel, social history (particularly the history of pity) and ancient Greek contributions to the modern human rights movement, the history of drama and the theater, Greco-Roman New Comedy, Greek and Latin epigraphy, and Greek calendars. In their own research and pedagogy, our faculty demonstrate a conspicuous commitment to interdisciplinarity.

Evelyn Adkins

Assistant Professor of Classics

Evelyn Adkins teaches Latin and Greek as well as a wide range of courses in translation on ancient literature, civilization, history, and archaeology. Her research focuses on Imperial Latin literature and the ancient novel, with particular interests in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass, discourse analysis, gender and sexuality, and Roman social and cultural history. Her current book project examines how status and power are negotiated through discourse in Apuleius’ novel, with discourse defined broadly to include speech, silence, written text, and nonverbal communication. Other recent projects include a study of religious silence in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and an article on the gender identity of the priests of the Syrian Goddess in the Greek and Latin versions of the ass-story. She also has a background in archaeology: she has fieldwork and museum experience in Greece, Italy, and Turkey, spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and taught material culture on site at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome.

Paul Iversen

Associate Professor and Chair Department of Classics, Director of Undergraduate Studies

Paul Iversen regularly teaches upper level Greek, Greek Civilization, Greek History, Archaeological and Epigraphical Field School, a SAGES departmental seminar on Alexander the Great, and Latin Comedy. His research interests and publications are in the areas of Greek and Latin Epigraphy, Hellenistic Culture and Society, and Greco-Roman New Comedy, especially Menander. He is currently working on two book projects. The first, in collaboration with John D. Morgan, concerns the recently deciphered calendar and games dial on the Antikythera Mechanism, while the second is a new Inscriptiones Graecae volume covering the Greek and Latin inscriptions of Corinth.

Peter Knox

Eric and Jane Nord Family Professor and Director of the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities

Professor Knox teaches a wide range of courses in Greek and Latin literature, as well as on topics in Roman culture, ancient epic and classical reception, using sources in translation.  His research interests focus primarily on Latin poetry and Greek poetry of the Hellenistic period, and he has published over a hundred articles and reviews on a wide range of subjects within those areas.  His books include Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Traditions of Augustan Poetry (1986); Ovid, Heroides: Select Epistles (1995);Oxford Readings in Ovid (2006); and A Companion to Ovid (2009).  Most recently he published The Oxford Anthology of Roman Literature (2013) in collaboration with J. C. McKeown, with whom he is also working on a companion anthology of Greek literature.  His other projects include an edition of the Greek and Latin poetry of Angelo Poliziano, forthcoming in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, and a new edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses for the Loeb Classical Library.  He has served as the Editor ofThe Classical Journal and is a Past President of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South.

Maggie Popkin

Robson Junior Professor, Associate Professor of Art History

Professor Popkin specializes in ancient Roman art and architecture. Her research interests include the relationship between architecture, spectacle, and ritual in the Roman world and the impact of visual culture on individual and social remembering in the classical world. Prof. Popkin has published articles on a range of topics, from archaic Greek vase painting to materiality in Republican Roman architecture.

Before joining the faculty at CWRU, Prof. Popkin was the Samothrace Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Fine Arts-NYU and Emory University. She has taught classes at the University of Hartford and New York University and has worked in the education departments of the Williams College Museum of Art and the Smith College Museum of Art. She has excavated at Selinunte in Sicily and at Samothrace in Greece, where she is an ongoing member of the archaeological team and a principal investigator for a project to explore the original context of the famous Nike of Samothrace; this project recently received a three-year collaborative research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Popkin has received various grants and awards, including from the Fulbright Program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Max Planck Institute’s Memoria Romana International Research Project, and CWRU’s Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities.

Maddalena Rumor

Visiting Assistant Professor

Professor Rumor’s research focuses on the social and intellectual history of medicine and pharmacology in antiquity, especially in the Ancient Near East. She is generally interested in the reasons and modes by which ancient scientific/technical ideas were generated, acquired a logical organization, developed, and were transmitted through time and geographical boundaries. In her current work, she applies these interests to the exploration of possible relationships between Babylonian healing practices and those of other ancient Mediterranean cultures, particularly those of Greece and Rome, as a means to better understand both. Stemming from this main interest is her parallel research in ancient technology, specifically that which lead to the development of Mesopotamian “alchemical” and glass-making techniques, of cuneiform gastronomical recipes, and the making of perfumes.

Rachel Sternberg

Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Certificate Program

Sternberg’s courses include Greek Civilization, Greek History, Classical Mythology, Women in the Ancient World, Elementary Ancient Greek, Sophocles, and Xenophon. The highlight of each year is a study trip to Greece. Sternberg holds a B.A. in archaeology and history from Cornell University, an M.A. in classics also from Cornell, and a Ph.D. in Greek from Bryn Mawr College. Her monograph, Tragedy Offstage: Suffering and Sympathy in Ancient Athens, was published by University of Texas Press in 2006, and her edited volume, Pity and Power in Ancient Athens, by Cambridge University Press in 2005. She is interested in the history of emotion, emotional discourse and moral rhetoric, and the reception of the classical tradition in the age of Jefferson. She is writing a book on how Athenian humane discourse relates to modernity’s Human Rights.

Timothy Wutrich

Senior Instructor

Timothy Wutrich teaches Greek and Latin language and literature, Greek and Roman drama and theater in translation, Greek and Roman literature surveys, Greek and Roman civilization, and Greek and Latin etymology. He also regularly teaches in the university’s SAGES program. His scholarly interests include all aspects of ancient Greek and Roman drama, Vergil, and the Classical Tradition in literature and the arts.