School of Arts and Sciences
Department of Classical Studies

Department Highlights

2026

  • New course:  Worried about how best to use AI? The Digital Humanities program (hosted by the Department of Classical Studies) is offering a new course, Reading in a Digital Age (DH 150)  in which you will read the latest research on how to use AI to work with more languages than you will be able to study, much less master and to explore research questions that were previously inaccessible to anyone. If you want to put yourself in a position to do original research and to understand the implications of new technology, consider this course.

  • Online Application for the Tufts MA Reading List: Peter Nadel, who received his Digital Humanities MA from the Tufts Department of Classical Studies and Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing Specialist for Tufts Computing, has published an initial reader for the Tufts MA reading list. The application could be customized to any course or PhD reading list.

  • Grants: The Department of Classical Studies is working on two new funded projects, each of which began in 2026. 

    Professor and Chair Gregory Crane, his long time collaborator (and former Tufts researcher) David A. Smith of Northeastern, and Associate Professor Riccardo Strobino are developing Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record, a project funded by Schmidt Sciences’ Humanities Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute. 

    At the same time, a grant from the Scholarly Editions and Translations program at the National Endowment for the Humanities (RQ-306857-26) is allowing Crane  and Strobino to begin work on a Born-Digital edition of Aristotle’s Poetics in Greek, Arabic and Latin.

  • Talk on Classical Tradition in America on April 7 at 4:30 at Fung House (48 Professor's Row): Carl J. Richard, the leading researcher in this topic, will talk about his work on exploring the Classical Tradition in America. There will be a dinner after this talk to which all interested students and faculty are invited. Please RSVP for the dinner to Jennifer Gifford.

  • Funded Research: In January 2026, the Perseus Digital Library began two new funded projects. Funding from the Schmidt Sciences Humanities  and Artificial Intelligence Virtual Institute is supporting “Beyond Translation: Opening up the Human Record.” Members of the Perseus Project have developed open datasets and automated tools that, with the aid of large language models, now enable users to engage with texts in unfamiliar languages through translation and word-by-word explanation. This evolving infrastructure links source texts to rich machine-actionable data—such as linguistic annotation, named entities, and metrical analysis—and opens new opportunities for AI researchers in translation alignment, variation analysis, citation linkage, and multilingual summarization. As humanists and computer scientists collaborate, the humanities become a proving ground for interpretability in AI, fostering a new generation of scholars who work fluently across both domains. This project brings together researchers from Tufts, Northeastern and Regensburg Germany. At Tufts, Charles Pletcher (who has taught courses on Digital Humanities and Ancient Greek as a lecturer at Tufts) joins the department now as a fulltime postdoctoral researcher for this project, while Schmidt Science funding allows Computer Science student Sarah Abowitz to complete her PhD under advisor Gregory Crane.

  • Meanwhile, a new grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Program is allowing Professors Gregory Crane and Riccardo  Strobino to begin work on an edition of Aristotle’s Poetics in Greek, Arabic and Latin. The project aims to create a digital edition of Aristotle’s Poetics in Greek, Arabic, and Latin, blending traditional philology with digital humanities to enhance access and bridge linguistic barriers. Richly annotated translations aligned with original texts will allow researchers without expertise in these languages to explore term usage, syntax, and cultural reception. It addresses critical gaps in Poetics scholarship, focusing on the 10th-century Arabic translation by Abū-Bishr Mattā, the 13th-century Latin by William of Moerbeke, and the Translation Movements of Baghdad (9th-10th CE) and Toledo (12th-13th CE). The openly accessible, born-digital edition will feature translation alignments, linguistic annotations, and commentaries, hosted on the Perseus Digital Library, enabling global engagement with Aristotle’s influential work.

  • Support from the Tufts Innovation fund has supported Bruce Hitchner and his collaborators on the Nemencha Project. This is a collaborative digital tools research initiative investigating the transformative interaction and consequences of the Roman Empire on the political economy of a conquered society and landscape; namely the semi-arid region of east-central Algeria extending to the high steppe of Tunisia known as the Nemencha, one of the most agriculturally productive regions of North Africa, supplying Rome, the Mediterranean, and later Constantinople with large amounts of grain, olive oil, wine and other goods and commodities between the 2nd c. BCE and 7th c. CE. Participants include, among others, undergraduate and graduate students in Classical Studies. A storymap for this research is available online here.

  • Computer Science PhD Dissertations in Classical Studies: Professor and Chair of Classical Studies Greg Crane welcomed his second Computer Science PhD student.  In January 2026, Sasha Spala, PhD student in the Department of Computer Science, began work on a dissertation project applying natural language processing to historical texts, with an initial focus on the changing meanings of words such as “freedom,” “liberty,” and “happiness” and  their equivalents in other languages. At the same time, Sarah Abowitz, with support from Tufts’ new  Schmidt Sciences-funded Beyond Translation project, is completing a dissertation that explores the development of automated and quantifiable commentary systems. She will be presenting her work at the April 2026 workshop on Science and Technology for Augmenting Reading (STAR) workshop at the CHI Human Factors in Computing Systems conference in Barcelona.

  • Undergraduate Research: In February 2026, Sue (Beining) Wu and Alessandro Carleton each presented at the Fourteenth Annual Undergraduate Classics Research Conference in Knoxville, Tennessee. Alessandro talked about Virgil's Eclogues in "Virgil's Eclogue to Nowhere," in which he explicated contentious reception on the Ninth Eclogue and how this reflects Virgil's atypical use of allusion to both Greek and Latin sources. Sue built on research she began with Professor Crane in summer 2025, examining how the Large Language Model Deepseek was  able not only to translate the Greek of Sophocles’ Antigone into Mandarin, but also to explain the poetic language and metrical form of the Antigone for a Chinese  audience. Sue’s research also earned her a Tufts Summer Scholars award that will allow her to continue her work at Tufts in summer 2026.

  • Graduate Student Research: In March 2026, MA student Estil Loyd presented at the annual meeting for the Classical Association of the Midwest and South (CAMWS 2026) in Mobile Alabama, providing her with an opportunity to share work from her MA thesis with a national audience. Her paper on the votive λίκνα from the Sanctuary of Demeter and Kore at Acrocorinth demonstrates how worshippers used altered miniature forms to evoke perpetual nourishment and to construct a symbolic world of divine engagement. These objects illuminate the human–divine relationship as it was shaped through collective imagination and local practice, while also underscoring the central role of ritual dining in Greek religious experience.

  • Spring 2026 is a particularly strong year for Digital Humanities at Tufts, with six MA thesis projects. Ivan Montalvo is working on Project Minerva: An AI-powered Latin tutor for improved learning experiences. This project develops an AI system that generates tailored Latin exercises by applying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to Classical Roman treebanks, grading vocabulary difficulty against the Oxford Latin Course. To ensure accuracy, a panel of three AI "jurors" strictly verifies the correctness of the generated questions and answers. Zoe Spriggs and Mitch Shiffer are working on Juno Reader: A Digital Annotation Tool for Classical Language Learning.  Zoe focuses on system development. Juno is an open-source, minimal-computing web application designed to help students transition to reading authentic Latin and ancient Greek texts by providing an interactive, scaffolded annotation environment. By utilizing preprocessed treebank data without relying on a formal backend, the platform delivers sustainable, immediate morphological and syntactic feedback to deepen learners' engagement with classical works. Mitch’s work focuses on evaluating how a system such as Juno supports student learning. Traditional classical language instruction often delays students' exposure to authentic texts, creating a frustrating gap between passive grammar memorization and translating unadapted literature. To address this pedagogical challenge, this paper examines how digital tools like Juno can facilitate early, confidence-building engagement with original ancient sources. 

  • Jesscia Thorne’s thesis, Visualizing Classical Philology: A Quantitative Study of Named Entities, Authorial Networks, and Territorial Extent integrates and extends work applying methods from Quantitative Textual Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to the analysis of Greek and Latin source texts. It analyzes patterns of similarity among authors across time and investigates the named entities—people, groups, and places—they reference and the frequency of those references. It also illustrates the extent of the Greek and Roman states and begins to explore how these cultures perceived outsiders. The mapping component anchors textual data within a visual framework, facilitating clearer interpretation and more accessible instruction without getting overwhelmed by the text itself.

  • Jessica Thorne’s thesis integrates and extends work applying methods from Quantitative Textual Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to the analysis of Greek and Latin source texts.

  • Other projects address languages besides Greek and Latin.  Matt Smith is developing a Historical French Reader: Medieval Period.  Building on methods from Natural Language Processing, this project has successfully annotated an anthology of old French sources, using the Deucalion tagger to align with EpiDoc guidelines. The resulting data, alongside a new AI-translated lexicon, is currently being integrated into the Perseus Digital Library to enable real-time vocabulary lookups for medieval French. Ayub Nur's research pairs traditional isnād-cum-matn analysis with an innovative AI-based semantic similarity framework to trace the historical origins of Medina's sacred status across early Islamic hadith variants. By leveraging Large Language Models to measure meaning preservation despite lexical variations, the project validates early historical narratives and establishes a new computational paradigm for analyzing fluid textual traditions.

Previous Years

Looking at Ancient Roman Plagues through an Environmental Lens 
The Rumsey Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies, Brandon McDonald builds a better understanding of antiquity by looking at the interplay of climate, environment, and disease.

Rethinking Ancient Rome and Its Colonies in Africa 
Chair of the Classical Studies Department Bruce Hitchner confronts the colonial legacy of archaeology in North Africa, and presents a new understanding of antiquity.

Reconstructing the Large Scale Olive Oil/Agricultural Economy of North Africa in the Roman Empire 
R. Bruce Hitchner’s project to employ remote sensing, deep learning models (AI), and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) with archaeo-historical documentation to produce a new inventory and analysis of archaeological sites in the Algerian Nemencha and Tunisian high steppe in North Africa, a region of mass olive oil production in the Roman Empire, has been awarded a Springboard grant of $34,788.08 from the Office of the Provost. Hitchner will head a team comprised of Magaly Koch (SOE, BU), Abigail Kosnik (A&S), Carolyn Talmadge (TTS), and Uku Uustalu (TTS).

Professor R. Bruce Hitchner is the editor of the forthcoming (November 2021) Wiley Blackwell Companion to North Africa in Antiquity. 
See the book cover/back design.

Digital Approaches to Teaching the Ancient Mediterranean 
Read about Professors Beaulieu and Bucci's approach to teaching computational methods to Humanities students.

Student Kenny Huang gave the Twentieth Dr. Joseph C. Cremone, Jr. Lecture titled "Digesting Disease: Maggots in Medicine" 
Kenny Huang, a Junior majoring in Chemistry and a member of J. H. Phillips' Medical History Seminar, recently on December 5, 2018 gave the Twentieth Dr. Joseph C. Cremone, Jr. Lecture at Lawrence Memorial Hospital (Medford, MA). The title of his lecture: "Digesting Disease: Maggots in Medicine."

Professors Bruce Hitchner and Matthew Harrington lead a J-term program 
Professors Bruce Hitchner and Matthew Harrington along with French Colleague, Dr. Guillaume Durand, of the American College of the Mediterranean in Aix-en-Provence, France, lead a J-term program: Mediterranean Basin Traveling Seminar in France, Italy and Greece.

R. Bruce Hitchner awarded Research Grant 
R. Bruce Hitchner has received a grant from the Mac Jannet Foundation in support of the Talloires Abbey Digital humanities Project

Interview with Marie-Claire Beaulieu 
Watch 'Why Ancient Myths Remain Relevant Today', Tufts Magazine's April 2018 interview with Prof. Marie-Claire Beaulieu, about her research on the meanings of birds in Greek Mythology.

Gregory Crane featured in German Magazine 
Gregory Crane was featured in the German U15 special issue on higher education on June 22, 2017.

Riccardo Strobino awarded Research Fellowship 
Riccardo Strobino has been awarded the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fellowship and will be spending the 2017-18 academic year at the Villa I Tatti, the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies.

Ioannis D. Evrigenis awarded Research Prize 
The Renaissance Society of America has awarded the 2016 RSA-TCP Article Prize in Digital Renaissance Research to Ioannis D. Evrigenis for his article, "Digital Tools and the History of Political Thought: The Case of Jean Bodin"

Marie-Claire Beaulieu's New Book is Available 
"The Sea in the Greek Imagination", Marie-Claire Beaulieu's new book is available! Check it out through UPenn Press, 2016. Professor Beaulieu proposes that the sea marks the boundary between mortals, immortals, and the dead. A copy is also on display in the Classical Studies Department.

Marie-Claire Beaulieu Selected as This Year's Recognition of Undergraduate Teaching Excellence (ROUTE) Award Winner 
The ROUTE Award is presented to junior full-time faculty members in Arts, Sciences, and Engineering who have demonstrated excellence in teaching and advising, concern for students' academic and personal growth, and the ability to convey a passion and enthusiasm for their field of study. The award was presented to Professor Beaulieu at the last faculty meeting this year, on May 13 at 2:45 p.m. in the Balch Arena. 

Professor Beaulieu has also been awarded a Mellon grant to further her work on the Perseids project.

Perseus Digital Humanities Project 
Recently, an article was written in Tufts University's Arts and Sciences News on the Perseus Digital Humanities Project at Tufts.

Department Welcomes Dr. Riccardo Strobino to the Position of Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor 
The Classical Studies Department is delighted to welcome Dr. Riccardo Strobino to the position of Mellon Bridge Assistant Professor in Greco-Roman and Arabic Traditions.  Currently a research associate at Ruhr-Universität Bochum and a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cambridge, Dr. Strobino's interests lie in the history of philosophy and logic in Antiquity, the Latin Middle Ages, and the Arabic-Islamic tradition. In his capacity at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Dr. Strobino has worked in particular on the reception of Aristotelian epistemology in Avicenna (d. 428/1037) and the Post-Avicennan tradition. Recently, he taught courses in Arabic-Islamic and Medieval philosophy as a visiting lecturer at UCLA and co-organized the 20th European Symposium of Medieval Logic and Semantics at the University of Cambridge.  As part of his current research, Dr. Strobino is writing a monograph on Avicenna's scientific knowledge from his Kitāb al-Burhān (Book of Demonstration), while also translating it into English.

Dr. Strobino's first course at Tufts, CLS 0189-01/PHL 0191-05: "Philosophy in the Greek, Latin, and Arabic Traditions," will introduce students to a comparative overview of philosophical concepts from Antiquity to the Arabic tradition.  Focusing on specific themes and their transmission in the context of various translation movements, students will consider a range of topics relating to metaphysics, natural philosophy, epistemology, and ethics.

Drama Professor Publishes a New Translation of Euripides' Bacchae 
Laurence Senelick, Professor of Drama at Tufts University, has published a new translation of Euripides' Bacchae through Broadway Play Publishing, Inc. Called "Crazed Women," the play was performed by Tufts students in the 2000-2001 season.