Guests

Natalie M. Van Deusen is the inaugural Henry Cabot and Linnea Lodge Professor of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Alberta, where she teaches a variety of courses on Scandinavian language, literature, and culture. Her research interests include Old Norse and Early Modern Icelandic paleograph...

Nick Brown is an American Egyptologist who has worked as an archaeologist in Egypt since 2011. He received his MA degree in Egyptology from the American University in Cairo in 2016, and currently is an Egyptology PhD candidate at UCLA. Currently he lives between Los Angeles, CA and Cairo, Egypt. His...

John K. Papadopoulos is Distinguished Professor of Archaeology and Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles, having served as Chair of the Department of Classics (2005-2008) and Chair of the Interdepartmental Archaeology PhD Program (2009-2019). His research and teaching interests inclu...

Jackson Crawford shares real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus.
With his Youtube channel dedicated to answering all the most frequently asked questions about Old Norse language and mythology, and...

Alice Mandell was trained in the Hebrew Bible and Northwest Semitics by UCLA’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. From 2016-2018, Alice was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 2018, Alice tr...

Bryant Kirkland joined the Classics Department at UCLA in 2017, following a year’s teaching at Kenyon College. He received degrees from Yale (PhD, 2016), UCL, and Davidson. He was a recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Germany as well as a fellowship at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscr...

Trevor Culley’s personal experience with both Persian history and podcasts began with a college extra credit assignment to listen to the first Hardcore History history episode on the Achaemenids. He was instantly enthralled with the stories of the Kings of Kings and coming a little late to the party...

Jacob Lauinger is an Assyriologist who focuses on Akkadian cuneiform texts of the first and second millennium B.C. with an interest in peripheral (i.e., extra-Mesopotamian) dialects of Akkadian. He received his B.A. in classical art and archaeology from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in...

Jennifer Stager is a writer and art historian focusing on the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean and its afterlives. Her areas of research include theories of color, materiality, feminisms, multilingualism, ancient Greek medicine, and classical receptions. She is the author of Seeing ...

Matthew Roller is Professor of Classics at Johns Hopkins University. His research and teaching range widely over the history, literature, philosophy, and art of ancient Rome. He is the author of three books: Constructing Autocracy: Aristocrats and Emperors in Julio-Claudian Rome (Princeton Univers...

Gareth Williams has taught at Columbia since 1992. He received a Ph.D. in 1990 from Cambridge University for a dissertation on Ovid’s exilic writings that subsequently resulted in two books, the first Banished Voices: Readings in Ovid’s Exile Poetry (Cambridge, 1994) and the second The Curse of Exil...

Jonathan Hall's earlier research was focused on the cultural and social history of ancient Greece, with a particular emphasis on the construction, meaning, and functions of ethnic identity among Greek communities. His first book, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 1997) received the 1999...