Senior Fellows

The Senior Fellows advise on the Center’s role as a distinguished, dynamic research facility for ancient Greek studies and related fields. The committee of Senior Fellows includes leading scholars in major disciplines of the study of ancient Greece, such as area and ethnic studies, anthropology, archaeology, art history, education, ethnography, ethnomusicology, folkloristics, history, linguistics, literary criticism, musicology, the natural and physical sciences, philology, philosophy, political science, reception studies, religious studies, and sociology, as well as related subdisciplines. The committee meets semi-annually in Washington, DC.

For a chronological list of previous Senior Fellows, click here.

Danielle Allen (2016-present), James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University, and Director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, is a political theorist who has published broadly in democratic theory, political sociology, and the history of political thought. Widely known for her work on justice and citizenship in both ancient Athens and modern America, Allen is the author of The World of Prometheus: The Politics of Punishing in Democratic Athens (2000), Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004), Why Plato Wrote (2010), Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality (2014), Education and Equality (2016), and Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. (2017). She is the co-editor of the award-winning Education, Justice, and Democracy (2013, with Rob Reich) and From Voice to Influence: Understanding Citizenship in the Digital Age (2015, with Jennifer Light). She is a former Chair of the Mellon Foundation Board, past Chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.  

Douglas Frame (2012-present) is the past Associate Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. He received his PhD from Harvard in 1971 and served as Associate Director of the CHS from 2000-2012. His publications include The Myth of Return in Early Greek Epic (1978) and Hippota Nestor (2009). 

Richard Martin (2012-present) is Co-Chair of the Senior Fellows and President of the Board of Directors of CHS Greece. He teaches Greek and Latin literature at Stanford, as the Antony and Isabelle Raubitschek Professor in Classics. Before taking up his chair at Stanford in 2000, Professor Martin taught Classics for eighteen years at Princeton University. He was the Chair of the Classics department at Stanford from 2002 through 2008. He is currently working on two books concerning Homer: the first, Rhapsoidia, examines how performance habits within oral tradition shaped the works attributed to Homer, Hesiod, and other poets. A second book in progress, The Last Hero Song: Telemachus and the Generation of the Odyssey, is about the self-consciousness of the Odyssey in terms of the end of a tradition. Martin is also finishing a volume on the performance of Greek poetry as represented in myth and art, as well as editing a collection of essays on the analysis of Greek myth. He is embarking on a study of Homeric theology and poetics. Previous projects include a full-scale multimedia version of the Odyssey on CD (in connection with distance learning experiments) and fieldwork in Crete centered on modern oral poetry (now being edited for a documentary DVD).

Leonard Muellner (2018-present) is Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. Educated at Harvard (Ph.D. 1973), his scholarly interests center on Homeric epic, with special interests in historical linguistics, anthropological approaches to the study of myth, and the poetics of oral traditional poetry. He recently returned from participating in two conferences in Brazil, at the Classics departments of the Universidade São Paulo and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, where he spoke on “The metonymic relationship between Achilles and Patroklos and its consequences” (São Paulo) and “The Non-Reception of Homeric Poetry in Attic Vase Paintings of the 6th and 5th Centuries BCE: a Model and some Examples of its Application” (Belo Horizonte). An article by him on Visual and Verbal Art and Memory will appear in Chinese in the Chinese journal, National Art this coming spring; also this spring, an article by him on the First Thousand Years of Greek will appear in Digital Classical Philology. Ancient Greek and Latin in the Digital Revolution, edited by Monica Berti.

Nikolaos Papazarkadas (2014-present) is the Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Chair of the S. B. Aleshire Center for the Study of Greek Epigraphy. He specializes in Greek history, archaeology, and epigraphy, having published extensively on inscriptions from Athens, Thebes, and the Cyclades, and he is one of the four senior editors of the Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum. His monograph Sacred and Public Land in Ancient Athens was published in 2011 by Oxford University Press. He is the editor of numerous collected volumes, most recently (co-edited with Carlos Noreña) From Document to History: Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World (Brill Studies in Greek and Roman Epigraphy no. 12, Leiden and Boston 2019). He is currently preparing a new corpus of Boeotian inscriptions (IG VII²)  for the Inscriptiones Graecae series with an international team of scholars under the aegis of the Berlin Academy.

Gloria Ferrari Pinney (2000-2006; 2016-present) is professor emerita of classical archaeology and art at Harvard University, where she taught from 1998 to 2003. She was previously a member of the faculty at Wilson College and at Bryn Mawr College, serving as the Doreen Canaday Spitzer Professor of Classical Studies from 1990 to 1993. In 1993 she moved to the University of Chicago. She has written on Roman art and ancient Greek art and poetry. Her 2003 monograph, Figures of Speech: Men and Maidens in Ancient Greece was awarded the 2004 Wiseman Book Award by the Archaeological Institute of America. Her last book, Alcman and the Cosmos of Sparta (2008) is a study of one of the earliest lyric songs and its attendant imagery. These books are representative of recent interests, which have focused on the interpretation of images, the construction of genders, and broadly on the intersection of texts and monuments. Her current research deals with visual and literary representations of geography and with the issue of continuities from the Aegean Bronze Age into the Iron Age. She is a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Mark Schiefsky (2013-present) took his Ph.D. degree in Classical Philosophy from Harvard University in 1999. He joined the faculty in June 2000 and has been a full professor in the Department since July 2007. His research interests are centered on the history of philosophy and science in the Greco-Roman world, especially medicine and mechanics. His publications include a commentary on the Hippocratic treatise On Ancient Medicine (Brill 2005), along with several articles on ancient medicine, mechanics, and mathematics. A further major concern of Professor Schiefsky's research is the application of information technology in humanistic scholarship, especially the history of science. From 2001-2004 he was the Principal Investigator of the Archimedes Project, an international initiative funded by the National Science Foundation to create a digital library for the history of mechanics and mechanical technology in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

Laura M. Slatkin (2011-present) is Co-Chair of the Senior Fellows. She is Gallatin Distinguished Professor in Classical Studies and Interdisciplinary Studies, New York University, Gallatin School and Deptartment of Comparative Literature. She is also Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. She has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, Yale University, and Columbia University. Her research and teaching interests include early Greek epic; wisdom traditions in classical and Near Eastern antiquity; and the reception of Homer. She has published articles on Greek epic and drama and most recently on "British Romantic Homer";  The Power of Thetis and Selected Essays was published by the CHS in 2011. She has served as the editor in chief of Classical Philology, and coedited Histories of Post-War French Thought, Volume 2: Antiquities (with G. Nagy and N. Loraux, New Press, 2001). She is currently collaborating on a study of the reception of Homer in British romantic poetry.

Anthony Snodgrass (2001-present) has been linked with the Center for Hellenic Studies, as a Senior Fellow, since 2001, the year of his retirement from the Laurence Professorship of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cambridge, UK. On first arriving in Cambridge 25 years earlier, he worked (under strong influence from the late M.I. Finley and other scholars) to change the received approaches, content and methods of the subject and free it from the intellectual and academic isolation into which it appeared to have drifted. This process is exemplified by his own books such as Archaic Greece:  the age of experiment (1980) and  An archaeology of Greece:  the present state and future scope of a discipline (1987), and especially by the contributions to the same movement by his former pupils, including Ian Morris, Robin Osborne, James Whitley, Susan E. Alcock and Jonathan Hall. At the same time, jointly with John Bintliff, he has directed the fieldwork and publication of the Boeotia Survey, a long-running project of intensive surface survey in Central Greece. In 2016 his academic colleagues offered a Festschrift volume to him (The archaeology of Greece and Rome), and in 2018 his former pupils dedicated another, under the title Classical Archaeology transformed:  an age of experiment.