Career Networking Event
Co-Sponsored by SCS and the Paideia Institute
Saturday January 6, 2018: 12-2PM
In response to the shifting job market for Classics PhDs, the Society for Classical Studies and the Paideia Institute will hold a Career Networking event at the annual AIA-SCS meeting. This event will allow for graduate students, contingent faculty, and others who are interested to meet with graduates of Classics MA / PhD programs whose primary career is not, or has not been, teaching and research at the college and university level.
Facilitated by John Paulas (UC Berkeley) and Jason Pedicone (Paideia Institute), this speed dating-like event will take place from 12:00pm - 2pm on Saturday, January 6th. Pre-registered attendees will check in at the door and will have fifteen minutes with each networker / group of networkers who will rotate around a series of roundtables for discussion with participants.
The biographies of a few of the networkers that will be in attendance are below. The list of networkers is not yet finalized, so we will be adding names and bios later this Fall.
Networker Biographies
Adam D. Blistein received his Ph.D. in Classical Languages and Literatures from Yale in 1980. From then until his retirement he was an administrator in not-for-profit organizations that spanned all three of the traditional branches of academia: a research institute (now defunct) that supported multi-disciplinary work in the social sciences, a learned society of cancer researchers, and from 1999-2016 the SCS.
Gilles Bransbourg won the French nationwide high schools’ Concours Général award in History in 1982 and completed a PhD in History and Civilizations at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 2004-2010. Prior to this, he had graduated in Economics, Mathematics, Political Science and Statistics in Paris, notably at École Polytechnique, Sciences Po and École Nationale de la Statistique et de l'Administration Économique from 1983 to 1990. He then became a market economist and held senior managing positions in the banking sector until 2005. He is currently a curator at the American Numismatic Society and a Research Associate at NYU’s Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, while teaching as an Adjunct at New York University. A frequent guest speaker in academic and business colloquiums and venues, he lectured in Economics at Sciences Po between 1990 and 1994 and at the Executive Master of Finance of Sciences Po between 2007 and 2015. Bransbourg also co-authored La Politique Monétaire de l’Euro in 2009, contributed to Fiscal Regimes and the Political Economy of Premodern States in 2015 and Le Gouvernement des Citoyens in 2017. He publishes occasional Op-Eds for Newsweek, Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal, Les Échos and other medias. Bransbourg was made a knight in the French Order of the Académiques Palmes in 2014. As a financial consultant and philanthropist, he serves on several boards and financial committees and advises a range of institutions, foundations and corporations in Europe and the US. He has contributed to the establishment of an English-French dual language curriculum in New York public schools.
Chris Caterine earned a doctorate in Classics from the University of Virginia and taught at Tulane for three years before deciding to leave academia. He currently works as a Pursuit Manager at Deloitte, developing strategic messaging and writing proposals for high-value consulting contracts.
John Paul Christy is Director of Public Programs at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), where he oversees a number of fellowship and grant programs and develops initiatives that highlight the public dimensions of humanities scholarship. This includes the Mellon/ACLS Public Fellows Program, which places recent humanities PhDs in two-year, practical fellowships in public policy, media, and cultural organizations. He also represents ACLS and its work to stakeholders in the academic and philanthropic communities and to the wider public. Before joining ACLS in 2012, Christy was a Presidential Management Fellow in Washington, DC, where his portfolio included projects related to US public diplomacy, Internet anti-censorship programs, and the public humanities. He received his PhD in classical studies from the University of Pennsylvania.
Diane Harris-Cline has had four careers, as a professor of archaeology and classics, a crypto-linguist, a small business consultant, and academic administrator. She will provide an unparalleled perspective of how a Classics degree can help someone thrive in so many different working environments. Dr. Cline received her B.A. in Classics from Stanford and her MA and PhD from Princeton University's program in Classical Archaeology. She has taught courses in ancient history, Greek archaeology, and Classics in two state universities, a historically black university, and a private university. Recipient of the National Cryptologic Literature Award for 2005, she worked in intelligence for four years, after 9/11, and then started her woman-owned small business doing consulting for strategic planning. Given her diverse background, she returned to academia as a history and classics professor at George Washington University while directing the University's cross-disciplinary collaboration initiatives. Author of two books, her current research projects use social network analysis to understand what factors enabled the ancient Greeks to be so innovative and creative. When networking with her, she will share her observations on what employers want and what skills students of classics and archaeology and ancient history can offer.
Jeff Cohen is a managing director, based in FSG’s Seattle office, and leads the firm’s Education and Youth practice. He has more than a decade of experience at FSG advising private and community foundations, nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and corporations on strategy, program design, and evaluation. At FSG, Jeff has led a variety of engagements encompassing strategic planning, education program strategy, evaluation, business planning, and program development. Prior to joining FSG, Jeff was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he served companies in the telecommunications industry as well as education organizations. Jeff holds an M.B.A. from Northwestern’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, where he was an F.C. Austin Scholar, an M.A. in Classics from Yale University, and a B.A., magna cum laude, in Classics from Harvard University.
Alex Conison completed his Ph.D. in Greek and Roman History at the University of Michigan in 2012 with a dissertation on the organization of the ancient Roman wine trade. Realizing he enjoyed the wine part of his work more than the history, he began working as a marketer in the wine and spirits business in the fall of 2012. He has spent (nearly) the last four years at Deutsch Family Wine & Spirits working first on [ yellow tail ] and currently as Brand Manager on Josh Cellars, America’s second largest premium wine brand. His role encompasses trend analysis & consumer research, commercial planning production forecasting, and all aspects of consumer marketing including advertising, public relations, & retail promotions.
Elda Granata is Associate Editor at Oxford University Press, where she oversees the editorial development of several innovative digital projects: the Oxford Classical Dictionary and the American and African history sections of the Oxford Research Encyclopedias. Before entering the world of digital publishing, she handled a wide range of history print publications at OUP, including the popular series Very Short Introductions, What Everyone Needs to Know®, and Oxford Handbooks. A native Italian, she completed a Ph.D. in Greek and Roman Philology at the University of Rome La Sapienza in 2013 with a dissertation on personal names in Greek epic poetry and was a visiting scholar at the University of Michigan in 2011/12.
Charles J. Henry is President of the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR). Dr. Henry oversees and provides strategy for its mission, which includes vital research on topics such as cyberinfrastructure, preservation of the cultural record, leadership, and the concepts of a digital library. He is a co-director of the Leading Change Institute. He is currently on the Board of Trustees of Tan Tao University in Vietnam, serves on the advisory board of Stanford University Libraries, and is also a Board member of the Center for Research Libraries, and a member of the Scientific Board of the Open Access Publishing in the European Network (OAPEN) project. He was a co-author of Our Cultural Commonwealth: The report of the American Council of Learned Societies Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and has published widely on topics relating to the humanities and advanced technology. Dr. Henry was a recipient of Fulbright Fellowship to study medieval manuscripts in Vienna, Austria, and also received Fulbright Senior Scholar awards for lecture series in New Zealand and China. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Columbia University.
Francis R. Hittinger holds his B.A. in Classics (University of Chicago, 2007), M.A. in Romance Languages (University of Notre Dame, 2010), and M.Phil./Ph.D. in Italian and Comparative Literature & Society (Columbia University, 2013/2016). His dissertation, “Dante as Critic of Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia," examined Dante’s political works in the context of his literary output, medieval Florentine culture and political institutions, the history of early (proto)capitalism in 13th and 14th century Italy, medieval political thought, and the history of ideas. Francis’ work seeks to demonstrate that Dante is one of the first articulate critics of what would later be known as capitalism in post-antique western intellectual history. He is looking forward to the possibility of adapting his research for a scholarly monograph in the future. Among Francis' many interests -- besides Classical antiquity and Medieval Italian history generally-- are Aristotle, Roman Stoicism, Giambattista Vico (see his translation of Vittorio Hösle’s book on Vico on ND press), Antonio Gramsci, the historiographic mythology of “humanism” in 15th-16th century Italian culture, the history of Christianity, genealogical and historicist methodologies, classical political economy, and the intersection(s) of capitalism and political theology. Most recently, Francis was a preceptor (2015-2016) then post-doctoral lecturer (2016-2017) in the Columbia Core Curriculum, teaching Contemporary Civilization I-II, Columbia’s signature “great books” course. Francis started a new career in secondary education in the Fall of 2017, and now serves as Latin and Social Studies teacher (and debate coach) at Mountain Lakes High School, a high-performing public school in Mountain Lakes, NJ
Carrie Hritz is the Associate Director for Research at the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), and a Research Scientist at the University of Maryland. The center is funded by the National Science foundation through a grant to the University of Maryland. Previously, she served as a Supervisory Geographer and the Branch Chief of Partnership Communication and Outreach at the US Census Bureau. From 2014-2015, she was an American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the National Science Foundation in the Geosciences Directorate. From 2008-2014, she was an assistant professor of anthropological archaeology at Penn State University. She is an archaeologist who specializes in the use of geospatial tools and remote sensing to investigate the evolution of human-environment relations in southern Mesopotamia, and has conducted surveys in Iraq, Turkey and Syria. Dr. Hritz received her PhD (2005) and MA (2001) in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from the University of Chicago. She has a MA in Public History from St. Cloud State University and a BA in Anthropology from New York University.
Paul T. Keyser studied physics and classics at St. Andrew’s School, Duke University, and at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he earned a Ph.D. in Physics and a Ph.D. in Classics. After a few years of research and teaching in Classics, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Cornell, the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC, and other places, he returned to his first love, programming. He worked as a software engineer for over a dozen years at the IBM Watson Research Center, and since early 2012 has been with Google. He is currently a site reliability engineer in Pittsburgh. His publications include work on gravitational physics, stylometry, and ancient science and technology; he is co-inventor on a number of patents in computer science. Two co-edited books have appeared, from Routledge, the source book on Greek science, and the Encyclopedia of Ancient Natural Scientists; a third is soon forthcoming, the Oxford Handbook of Science and Medicine in the Classical World. Current projects in ancient science include papers on: case studies, small-cosmos cosmology, experiments, and scientific devices, plus planned books on bottle-messages, on fetal formation, on the evolution of ancient science, and on the history of alchemy.
Brigitte Libby earned her PhD in Classical Philology from Princeton University in 2011. Her research and teaching interests center on narrative strategies in Roman literature, lies and fiction, and uses of Greek myth at Rome. Her book project traces the memory of Troy in Roman poetry, and she has published on the narrative techniques of a variety of authors. Brigitte was visiting assistant professor at Amherst College and then assistant professor at Boston College, where her experience teaching motivated her to seek a role more focused on helping students navigate their personal and academic challenges. She has found great fulfillment in her current role as Allston Burr Assistant Dean of Harvard College at Pforzheimer House and Lecturer in Classics at Harvard.
Mark Mash is a public school teacher and independent scholar who lives and works in the Research Triangle Region of North Carolina. He earned his MA and PhD in Classics from UNC-Chapel Hill, and his BA in Classics from the University of Texas at Austin. He has taught Latin I-AP for the past 16 years at Leesville Road High School in Wake County, the largest public school system in North Carolina and the 15th largest in the United States. While teaching at Leesville, he finished his comprehensive exams, lateral entry teacher certification, and dissertation. In 2016, Mark was named one of 13 Teacher of the Year finalists in a district of over 170 schools and 10,000 teachers. In 2016-2017, he was appointed to the Superintendent's Teacher Advisory Council. Mark's current roles include School Improvement Chair, Webmaster, Social Media Manager, Mentor Teacher, and member of the Instructional Leadership Team. He has published essays on Herodotus in a Routledge monograph (2016), Histos Supplement 6 (2017), and The Herodotus Encyclopedia (Wiley, forthcoming 2018). He regularly advises Classics undergraduate and graduate students at UNC-Chapel Hill who are considering teaching in schools.
Ariane Schwartz works for the management consulting firm McKinsey, where she is on the course operations team for McKinsey Academy. She taught for several years at Dartmouth, UCLA, and Harvard. She is also Assistant Editor for the I Tatti Renaissance Library. She has co-founded the Society for Early Modern Classical Reception (a SCS affiliate group) and has been involved in several digital humanities initiatives, including Quantitative Criticism Lab (now based at UT-Austin) and the new Online Public Classics Archive (Paideia Institute). She received her B.A. and M.A. in Classical Studies from the University of Pennsylvania and Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University.
Edward "Ted" Zarrow, before earning his PhD in Classics and Ancient History from Yale in 2007, received an M.St. in Greek & Roman History from Brasenose College, Oxford, and an M.A. in Classical Languages from Boston College. In 2007, he made the transition from teaching in college to the high school environment, and he is currently in his 11th year teaching Latin (and sometimes Greek) at Westwood High School in Westwood, MA. He is the past-President of the Classical Association of Massachusetts (CAM), the Coordinator of Educational Programs for the Classical Association of New England (CANE), the Advocacy Coordinator for the Massachusetts Foreign Language Association (MaFLA), and the incoming MA representative to the National Council of State Supervisors of Foreign Languages (NCSSFL). He has won numerous teaching awards at both the high school and college levels for his unorthodox approaches to teaching language, history, & culture. He was the ACTFL 2016 National Language Teacher of the Year.
Michael Zimm, after receiving his PhD in Classics from Yale in 2016, was hired as a Creative Strategist at Digital Surgeons, a digital marketing company headquartered in New Haven, CT.
In order to sign up:
We will issue a form to sign up for this event in the first two weeks of November. Space is limited, and will be granted on a first-come, first-served basis.