Vassar Greek and Roman Studies

10/14/2026

Students in Prof. Rice's Intro to Greek and Roman Civ (GRST 105) debated the constitutions of Sparta and Athens as represented by Xenophon and Pseudo-Aristotle.

10/13/2026

Professor Dozier wrote about Rubio's recent speech in Greece for Salon:

The Trump administration keeps borrowing ancient prestige to make its brutality look noble

10/13/2026

Luke Soucy, award winning translator of Ovid's Metamorphoses and author of an imminently forthcoming collection of Q***r Roman Verse spent last week in residence at Vassar. He visited several courses and delivered a public lecture/reading about the significance of recovering and accurately translating descriptions of queerness from ancient Latin sources.

09/08/2026

Professor Dozier's "The White Pedestal" was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement. "A bracing, important book."

In 2017, Curtis Dozier, an expert in Roman rhetoric at Vassar College, founded Pharos: Doing justice to the classics. A watchdog website for ancient

08/24/2026

Prof. Rice delivering a paper at Durham University earlier this month titled “Religion, Slavery, and the Law in the Late Roman Household: Preliminary Considerations” as part of a conference on The Domestic Dimension of Religious Conflict in the Ancient Mediterranean. This term he's teaching "Introduction to Greek and Roman Civilizations" and Intermediate Latin.

08/03/2026

As part of the 2026 Institute for Liberal Arts Digital Scholarship (ILiADS), hosted this year by Vassar College Libraries, Prof. Rice met with Prof. Rhodora Grate Vennarucci from Denison University and Dr. Robert Conn from the Thaden School to learn about their new Latin learning virtual reality digital humanities project, titled IVR + Living Latin. The project brings together Prof. Vennarucci's expertise in the archaeology of Roman retail with Dr. Conn's living Latin pedagogy to simulate a choose-your-own-adventure shopping experience in Latin! Prof. Rice had a chance to try out the simulation: look at the wonder on his face!

07/22/2026

When it rains it pours, today Professor Dozier also published his review of Nolan's Odyssey, commenting on the politics of the film in relation to the white nationalist interpretations of the poem that he wrote about in "The White Pedestal" https://pghrev.com/nolans-odyssey-and-the-constraints-of-the-past/

07/22/2026

Professor Dozier was interviewed for Ms. Magazine (along with Rosa Andújar, who spoke at Vassar about Carribean adaptations of Greek tragedies in 1970s NYC last Spring) about the casting in Nolan's Odyssey.

The diversity of the ancient world is our collective heritage. Scholars say the controversy over The Odyssey reflects a centuries-long effort to whitewash the ancient world.

05/13/2026

Professor Dozier is offering a 3-session online course for the 92nd Street Y in June (17, 24, and July 1) on White nationalism and Greco-Roman antiquity. Expect an in-depth introduction to why the far right is fascinated with ancient history, how they know more about the past than you might expect, and how traditions of classicism outside the mainstream can help challenge their narratives.
https://roundtable.org/live-courses/history/how-white-nationalists-use-ancient-greece-and-rome-to-justify-hate

05/06/2026

Happy end of classes! Here students in Prof. Rice's Elementary Greek course share their final projects, in which they worked in groups to prepare creative ways to study grammar ahead of their final exam. They planned card games and escape rooms to review participles, prepositions, and verb forms!