Student Scholarship

Graduate Student Awards and Scholarship

Glenn Maur, AG19

Glenn received his bachelor's degree in Classics and French from the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University in 2016. He wrote his thesis on the reception of Alexander the Great in Byzantine, French, and Arabic literature for which he was awarded the School of International Letters and Cultures Dean's Medal. While in Arizona, he was also a research assistant and bibliographer for the Iter Gateway digital humanities project, a joint venture between the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and the University of Toronto, and taught beginning and intermediate Latin for Great Hearts Academy schools. At Tufts he is working on a thesis which involves theories about the body, deformity, and the social history of slavery in the ancient world as well as stylistics and authorship in the Life of Aesop. He is also preparing a digital edition of an unpublished Arabic translation of the Life of Aesop for which he was awarded a Concordia Foundation Fellowship to continue his study of Classical Arabic at Harvard Divinity School in the summer of 2018. His interests include classics reception, ancient biography, literary theory, computational approaches to literature via computer science, the ancient novel, and text networks. He has presented research at conferences hosted by the ACMRS, Willamette University, Brandeis University, and the University of Virginia.

Katherine Cottrell, AG19

Kate is currently working on her master’s thesis exploring the construction of gender, the rite of passage that is marriage and the importance of citizenship in late Republican and early Augustan Rome by considering Atalanta as subtext for Camilla in the Aeneid. This project is a continuation of her long-standing scholastic focus on women in Greco-Roman antiquity. In 2011 she presented her capstone project, "Ruinous Paragon: The Search for Feminism in Platonic Theory," for her BA in Philosophy from Hobart and William Smith Colleges at the 2nd Annual Undergraduate Philosophy Conference at RIT. In 2015 she was named a Presidential Scholar in support of her first MA in Theological Studies with the concentration Women, Gender, Sexuality and Religion at Harvard Divinity School. Her work there focused primarily on women in ancient athletics and the Early Christian martyr stories of Perpetua, Felicity and Thecla. During this degree her paper "Competition, Mutuality, and Ambiguity: Women's Erotics in Sappho Song 1 and 94" was published online in the Classic@ Journal through the Center for Hellenic Studies. In addition to her research on the feminine in the antiquity, Kate is also pursuing questions of Greek and Latin pedagogy at the intersection with Digital Humanities. She is preparing a paper proposal for CANE 2019 about teaching TEI/XML markup of epigraphy in high schools, participating in a working group for encoding Greek, Latin and Persian prosody, and exploring how DH tools can aid in corpus based curriculum development.

Tianran Liu, AG18

Tianran Liu, G18, presented a paper at CAMWS 2018 in Albuquerque, NM. The title of her work is: True or False: The Intertextuality of Lucian's True History and How to Write History. She is also a co-editor on the digital publication of the True Histories of Lucian: Treebank Analysis (with Dr. J. Matthew Harrington) within the Perseus Digital Library. Liu has now earned a place in the PhD program in Classics at UCLA.

Undergraduate Awards and Scholarship

The Tisch Library Miscellany Collection

A few years ago, the Special Collections librarians working in Tisch Library discovered an uncatalogued collection of miscellaneous leaves from medieval manuscripts and early printed books (ranging in date from the 12th to the 19th century) in the Tisch Library Stacks. With only the scanty notes that accompanied the documents to rely on, the librarians were at a loss to describe the date, contents, and historical significance of the collection. In an effort to support their own research on the documents and to share this discovery with the university community and the public, they digitized the collection and published it online.

As information about this amazing find circulated, Marie-Claire Beaulieu collaborated with Tisch Special Collections and Cataloging and Metadata Services to have undergraduate and graduate Medieval Latin students decipher, translate, and annotate the collection online. As students progressed in deciphering the documents, they made interesting and surprising discoveries.

All of the students' work produced in this class was published online on the Tisch Library Miscellany page and has made a significant contribution to scholarship in the field by providing a valuable resource for professors, librarians, and scholars at Tufts and around the world, who can now access translations and annotations for their teaching and research. An article about the students' work also appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. LVII, 40, July 1, 2011, A16, article by Ryan Brown.