Harriet Fertik is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics and an affiliate of the Department of Comparative Studies, the Melton Center for Jewish Studies and the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. Her research focuses on literature and political thought in ancient Rome and on classical receptions. Her first book, The Ruler’s House: Contesting Power and Privacy in Julio-Claudian Rome (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) explored how Romans used the world of the house to interpret and interrogate the role of the emperor. Her current book project, Position and Persuasion: W.E.B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and the Uses of Antiquity, explores how and why Du Bois, a Black American writer, sociologist and civil rights activist, and Arendt, a German Jewish refugee, essayist and political theorist, deploy Greek, Roman and Jewish antiquity in their accounts of political education. By putting these thinkers in dialogue, she aims to develop a new approach to two interrelated problems in the study of Classics, which have implications for humanistic scholarship more generally. The first is the status of “tradition,” a word that has become bound up with concerns about the exclusivity of classical canons. The second concerns positionality, particularly how our situatedness as scholars informs our interpretations of the ancient past.
Ben Folit-Weinberg is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics. He is a scholar of ancient Greek thought whose research operates at the intersection of poetry and drama, philosophy and intellectual history. His first book, Homer, Parmenides, and the Road to Demonstration (Cambridge University Press, 2022; available Open Access), explores how the image of the hodos – the “road,” “route,” “way” or “journey” – played a decisive role in Parmenides’ development of what we would call extended deduction demonstration and aspects of demonstration. It also sheds new light on the image of the hodos in Homer’s Odyssey and its relationship to aspects of Homeric composition and is the first to detail the significance of the physical nature of Greek rut-roads for the history of Greek thought. This is the first installment of a larger research program dedicated to the significance of the hodos in archaic and classical Greek thought through Plato. He has published several articles on this topic, including the semantics of words for roads and journeying, the significance of the hodos in Homer, and how the relationship between the word hodos and its uses in different texts should be theorized.
James D. Moore is assistant professor in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. He is a philologist and social historian of the ancient Near East and ancient Mediterranean. In addition to his post at Ohio State, he is Chargé de Conférence at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris (2023–2024), and a collaborator on the ERC project SLaVEgents: Enslaved persons in the making of societies and cultures in Western Eurasia and North Africa, 1000 BCE - 300 CE (2023–2028). He publishes broadly in ancient Near Eastern studies, has edited hundreds of new Northwest Semitic documents (in Aramaic, Phoenician and Hebrew), written on ancient Hebrew and Aramaic literatures, and publishes frequently on social history and scribal culture. He advocates for the incorporation of digital resources in the study of languages and culture. He teaches Near Eastern Languages, Hebrew Bible and ancient historical courses.
