Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer (born March 17, 1966) is an American academic and is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. [1] She has previously held professorships at the University of California, Berkeley [2] and Brown University where she was the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics in 2008-2009. [3] From 2015 to 2024 she was the Director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (IFK) at the University of Chicago. [4]
Bartsch is the daughter of a UN economist and spent her childhood in London, Geneva (where she studied at the International School of Geneva), Tehran, Jakarta, and the Fiji Islands. She earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1987 and both her M.A. and Ph.D. (1992) from the University of California, Berkeley in Latin and classics, respectively. She was married to University of Chicago president and mathematician Robert Zimmer from 2011 until his death in 2023.
Bartsch's contributions have been to classical scholarship [5] in the areas of the literature and culture of Julio-Claudian Rome, the ancient novel, Roman stoicism, and the classical tradition. [6] More recently, Bartsch has branched out into the effect of the ancient world on our modern one, especially in Plato Goes to China: The Ancient Greeks and Chinese Nationalism. Bartsch is also the author of an acclaimed translation of Vergil's "Aeneid." She was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College in 2000 and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2006 at the University of Chicago. She was awarded an ACLS Fellowship in 1999 [7] and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. [8] She served as chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Chicago Press from 2006 to 2008 [9] and editor-in-chief of Classical Philology from 2000 to 2004 and 2014 onwards. She was appointed the inaugural director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge [10] and was the lead editor of the journal KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge from 2015-2024. [11] Bartsch currently sits on the board of the Chicago Humanities Festival. [12]
Cassandra or Kassandra in Greek mythology was a Trojan priestess dedicated to the god Apollo and fated by him to utter true prophecies but never to be believed. In modern usage her name is employed as a rhetorical device to indicate a person whose accurate prophecies, generally of impending disaster, are not believed.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca the Younger, usually known mononymously as Seneca, was a Stoic philosopher of Ancient Rome, a statesman, dramatist, and in one work, satirist, from the post-Augustan age of Latin literature.
Frederick M. Ahl is a professor of classics and comparative literature at Cornell University. He is known for his work in Greek and Roman epic and drama, and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, as well as for translations of tragedy and Latin epic.
Richard John Alexander Talbert is a British-American contemporary ancient historian and classicist on the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was William Rand Kenan, Jr., Professor of History and is currently Research Professor in charge of the Ancient World Mapping Center. Talbert is a leading scholar of ancient geography and ideas of space in the ancient Mediterranean world.
Elaine Fantham was a British-Canadian classicist whose expertise lay particularly in Latin literature, especially comedy, epic poetry and rhetoric, and in the social history of Roman women. Much of her work was concerned with the intersection of literature and Greek and Roman history. She spoke fluent Italian, German and French and presented lectures and conference papers around the world—including in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Argentina, and Australia.
John Richard "Jaś" Elsner, is a British art historian and classicist, who is Professor of Late Antique Art in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford, Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Visiting Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago. He is mainly known for his work on Roman art, including Late Antiquity and Byzantine art, as well as the historiography of art history, and is a prolific writer on these and other topics. Elsner has been described as "one of the most well-known figures in the field of ancient art history, respected for his notable erudition, extensive range of interests and expertise, his continuing productivity, and above all, for the originality of his mind", and by Shadi Bartsch, a colleague at Chicago, as "the predominant contemporary scholar of the relationship between classical art and ancient subjectivity".
De Otio is a 1st-century Latin work by Seneca. It survives in a fragmentary state. The work concerns the rational use of spare time, whereby one can still actively aid humankind by engaging in wider questions about nature and the universe.
Catharine Harmon Edwards is a British ancient historian and academic. She is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a specialist in Roman cultural history and Latin prose literature, particularly Seneca the Younger.
Miriam Tamara Griffin was an American classical scholar and tutor of ancient history at Somerville College at the University of Oxford from 1967 to 2002. She was a scholar of Roman history and ancient thought, and wrote books on the Emperor Nero and his tutor, Seneca, encouraging an appreciation of the philosophical writings of the ancient Romans within their historical context.
Judith P. Hallett is Professor and Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Emerita of Classics, having formerly been the Graduate Director at the Department of Classics, University of Maryland. Her research focuses on women, the family, and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome, particularly in Latin literature. She is also an expert on classical education and reception in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz is a classical scholar, specialising in ancient Greek literature and intersectional feminism.
Antonia Jane Reobone Syson was a British-American classical scholar specialising in the study of Virgil's Aeneid.
Michèle Lowrie is the Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Service Professor of Classics and the college at the University of Chicago. She is a specialist in Roman literature and political thought.
Serena Connolly is a scholar of Ancient Roman history, with a research focus on Roman Social History and Latin literature. Connolly received a B.A. from Cambridge University in 1998. She went on to earn a Ph.D. at Yale University in 2004, where her doctoral dissertation was directed by John F. Matthews. She held the positions of Lecturer in the Classics Department at Yale University from 2004 to 2007 and then Visiting assistant professor in the Classics Department at Rutgers University from 2007 to 2008, before accepting a tenure-track position as assistant professor in the Classics Department at Rutgers in 2008. She was awarded tenure and promotion to associate professor in 2012.
Kelly Olson is a Canadian Classicist. She is Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Western Ontario.
Kristina Milnor is Professor of Classics in the Department of Classics and Ancient Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She specialises in Latin literature, Roman history, feminist theory and gender studies.
Walter Ralph Johnson, commonly known as W. Ralph Johnson and published as W. R. Johnson, was an American classicist. He was the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Chicago from 1989 to 1998.
Robert A. Kaster is an American classicist and retired academic. He was a professor of classics and the Kennedy Foundation Professor of Latin at Princeton University from 1997 to 2018.
