Dr. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a Professor of Classics at Princeton (at the time of this recording), joins Lexie to discuss how growing up unhoused in New York City led him to reading in a shelter library and discovering Greece and Rome, the efforts to revise curricula toward race, gender, and sexuality studies, the limits of relying on one faculty member for such courses, and the importance of hiring, and outlines two reception projects—Classicism and Other Phobias and a book on Dominican classical reception and racialization.

Gigi Berardi, a Western Washington University environmental science professor and award-winning writer who has taught in Italy for 15 years, talks about her historical fiction novel Bianca’s Cure. Gigi explains choosing the Medici because their patronage shaped Florence and because her book centers on the “greatest mystery of the Renaissance”: the near-simultaneous deaths of Grand Duke Francesco de’ Medici and his wife Bianca Cappello, debated as arsenic poisoning, malaria, or murder by his brother Ferdinando. She describes building an accurate historical “skeleton” from primary sources and extensive fact-checking with Florence researchers while inventing plausible internal monologue using tonal exercises. The conversation covers Bianca’s Venetian aristocratic background, Renaissance medicine and Artemisia/antimalarial history, women’s roles in alchemy, Florence as a character, and Gigi’s view of success as visibility and reader engagement.

Dr. Kate Cook, a Lecturer in Greek Culture at King’s College London, joins Lexie to discuss falling in love with tragedy after reading Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Kassandra’s scene, connecting hostility toward prominent or “masculinized” women in modern games to ancient tragic narratives about women, and critiquing the “historical accuracy” discourse in gaming which includes mods that remove women.