Career Networking Event
In response to the shifting job market for Classics PhDs, the Society for Classical Studies 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 (Ph.D. Matters), this speed dating-like event will take place from 12:00pm - 2pm on Saturday, January 4th. 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.
This event is free for registered attendees at the AIA/SCS 2020 Annual Meeting, but you must sign up using the form linked below.
The biographies of confirmed 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.
In order to sign up:
You must sign up for this event by filling out this form.
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Networker Biographies
Anna Andresian: Anna Andresian taught middle and upper school Latin for 11 years before transitioning to a career as a software engineer in 2014. She holds a B.A. in Classics from Brown University and a M.St. in Latin & Greek Languages and Literature from the University of Oxford. She is the administrator of the Latin learning website magistrula.com and the author of "Looking at Latin: A Grammar for Pre-College" as well as "Vocabula Picta: An Illustrated Latin Lexicon for the Modern World." Anna now lives in San Francisco and works as a software engineer at Altitude Learning.
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.
Rebecca Miller Brown: Rebecca Miller Brown currently serves as the Assistant Director, Graduate Student Programming, at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, where she plays a key role in training and mentoring graduate student teachers. Additionally, she facilitates the development and integration of all Bok programming for graduate students, including seminars, workshops, consultations, and further resources. Prior to joining the Bok Center, Rebecca served as an Instructional Technologist in Academic Technology at Harvard, where she worked with faculty and graduate student instructors on the thoughtful and effective integration of educational technologies into their courses. She has additional experience teaching Latin and ancient Greek at the high school level, copy editing for the Harvard Art Museums and Department of the Classics, and teaching knitting and sewing to kids and adults. Rebecca earned her PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University, as well as an MA from the University of Oxford and BA from Georgetown University, both in the Classics.
Christopher Brunelle: Christopher Brunelle is Assistant Professor Emeritus of Classics at St. Olaf College. After earning his Ph.D. from Chapel Hill in 1997 he taught at Vanderbilt University, Gustavus Adolphus College, and St. Olaf, and in 2018 he returned to his alma mater, Carleton College, as Associate Director of Alumni Relations. He has chaired the SCS Annual Fund Committee since 2015 and has also served since 2003 as the Director of Music at First United Church of Christ in Northfield, Minnesota.
Chris Caterine: 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.
Talia Chicherio: Talia Chicherio is the high school Latin teacher at McLean School in Potomac, MD, and an instructor for Greek and Roman Mythology at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her BA in English and Latin from Oberlin College and her MA in Classics from the University of Maryland. Outside of class, Talia sponsors her school's Latin Club, affiliated with JCL, and its student-led Equity and Social Justice Forum. She is passionate about letting students know that Latin is for everybody and that it touches a myriad of aspects of our daily lives.
Emily Beugelmans Cook holds a B.A. (summa cum laude) in Classical Civilization from UCLA and a M.A. in Classics from Vanderbilt University. After spending time as a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, Emily joined Ruby Press, a boutique public relations agency, where she earned clients placements in national publications like Vogue, Elle and InStyle. Emily transitioned into tech with a role in instructional design at Cerego, an adaptive learning company based in San Francisco. She is currently a Customer Success Manager at Lattice, a startup that makes performance management software for forward-thinking organizations.
Helen Cullyer holds an MA and PhD in Classics from Yale University. She taught at the Evergreen State College and University of PIttsburgh prior to becoming a program officer in Scholarly Communications at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, where she transitioned from research and teaching to non-profit management, administration, and grant-making. After 8 years (2008-2016) at the Mellon Foundation, she was appointed Executive Director of the Society for Classical Studies, succeeding Dr. Adam Blistein.
Tess Davis: Tess Davis, a lawyer and archaeologist by training, is Executive Director of the Antiquities Coalition. Davis oversees the organization’s work to fight cultural racketeering worldwide, as well as its award-winning think tank in Washington. She has been a legal consultant for the US and foreign governments and works with both the art world and law enforcement to keep looted antiquities off the market. She writes and speaks widely on these issues — having been published in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, Foreign Policy, and various scholarly publications — and featured in documentaries in America and Europe. She is admitted to the New York State Bar and teaches cultural heritage law at Johns Hopkins University. In 2015, the Royal Government of Cambodia knighted Davis for her work to recover the country’s plundered treasures, awarding her the rank of Commander in the Royal Order of the Sahametrei.
Elda Granata: Elda Granata is an Acquisitions Editor at Oxford University Press, where she oversees Reference publications in literature, linguistics, and classics, including the digital Oxford Classical Dictionary. During her five years at OUP, she has worked on a variety of projects, from history trade books to established series such as Oxford Handbooks and Very Short Introductions. A native Italian, she completed her PhD in Classics at La Sapienza University of Rome in 2013 with a dissertation on personal names in Greek epic poetry.
Carrie Hritz: Director of Research, National Socio Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC), Associate Research Scientist University of Maryland. Dr. Carrie Hritz is the Director of Research at (SESYNC), where she leads the research programs, and communications. In this role, she works with leadership to develop calls for proposals, identify partnership and collaboration opportunities, and provides support for research teams throughout the project cycle. She is trained as a landscape archaeologist with expertise in using Geospatial spatial tools, and regional expertise in the Middle East, looking at the patterns of human-environment interactions during the period of the first urban cities. From 1999-2013, Carrie led archaeological fieldwork in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq, participating in one of the first projects to work in the southern Iraqi marshes since the late 1960s. From 2008-2014, Carrie was faculty at Penn State University and ran the Geospatial technologies lab in the Anthropology Department. After leaving her academic position, she served as a AAAS fellow in the Geosciences Directorate at NSF (2014-2015) and Branch Chief of Partnership Communication and Outreach in the Geography Division at the US Census Bureau (2015-2017). She has a BA in Anthropology from New York University, and a MA and PhD from the University of Chicago in Near Eastern Archaeology.
Jeff Leon: Jeff Leon is a Lead User Experience Strategist and Lead Associate at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he works with federal clients to develop ways to use digital solutions and the internet to improve citizens' interactions with US government agencies. He is currently working on Recreation.gov, a website where people can make camping, tour and high-adventure permit reservations at federal lands (e.g. National Parks, National Forests, US Army Corps of Engineer Lakes, etc.). In this role, Jeff works with federal partners from the National Park Service, US Forest Service, US Army Corps of Engineers, Bureau of Land Management, and other agencies to identify the needs of agency employees and the public at large. He and his team then design and build digital solutions to meet these needs. Prior to User Experience Design, Jeff received a PhD in Classics, with a specialization in Classical Archaeology from Cornell University, where he worked on field projects in Cyprus, Greece and Armenia and wrote his dissertation on the political economy of Late Bronze Age shepherds on Crete and Cyprus. He credits his PhD -- and the deep thinking in Classics, Archaeology and Anthropology that it involved -- with helping him develop a unique, historically-grounded and original approach to design thinking and user experience strategy.
Matthew Loar is Director of Fellowships at Washington and Lee University, where he works with students applying for nationally competitive fellowships such as the Fulbright and Rhodes scholarships. He holds an M.St. in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford (2009) and a Ph.D. in Classics from Stanford University (2015), and he was a Lecturer (2015-2016) and then Assistant Professor of Classics (2016-2019) at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln prior to accepting his position at Washington and Lee.
Mark Mash: Mark Mash is a public high school Latin teacher who lives and works in the Raleigh-Durham area of North Carolina. He earned his MA and PhD in Classics from UNC-Chapel Hill and his BA in Classics from UT-Austin. He has taught Latin I-AP for the past 18 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. He was named the Teacher of the Year for his school in 2015 and a Teacher of the Year Finalist for the school system in 2016. His current roles include School Improvement Chair, Webmaster, Social Media Manager, Mentor Teacher, and member of the Leadership Team. He has published essays on Herodotus in Routledge, Histos, and Wiley (forthcoming, 2020). He regularly advises Classics graduate students who are considering teaching Latin in public high schools.
Ariane Schwartz: Ariane Schwartz works for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she helps clients build capabilities and accelerate organizational transformations on the course operations team at McKinsey Academy. She taught for several years at Dartmouth, UCLA, and Harvard. 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 (based at UT-Austin). 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.
Laura Surtees: Laura Surtees is a Research and Instruction Library and Coordinator of Rhys Carpenter Library at Bryn Mawr College. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. in Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology from Bryn Mawr College, M.A. in Classics from the University of Alberta, and her B.A. in Classical Archaeology from Wilfrid Laurier University. Laura's dissertation examines the archaeological evidence for urban development at Kastro Kallithea, the Hellenistic city in Thessaly where she was Field Director and Co-Director of the Kastro Kallithea Archaeological Project and is involved in its publication. Before shifting her focus to the library, Laura taught archaeology and ancient history in a variety of instructional settings, from field school students on excavations in Greece to Philadelphia area universities like the University of Pennsylvania and Franklin and Marshall. Now a research and instruction librarian, Laura brings her background in classics and archaeology to a wider student population through research and library instruction and the promotion of information literacy in Rhys Carpenter Library.
Rob Tempio: Rob Tempio is Senior Publisher at Princeton University Press commissioning books in Classics, Ancient History, Archaeology, Philosophy, and Political Theory. Prior to joining Princeton in 2006, Rob previously worked at Routledge and Oxford University Press
Phil Venticinque: Assistant Provost, University of Chicago. After nearly a decade as a faculty member at Cornell College (2009-2018) as an assistant and then associate professor of Classics, Phil Venticinque joined the University of Chicago Provost Office during the 2018-19 academic year. As an Assistant Provost, he supports the Provost Office’s work in several areas: academic and faculty affairs, academic appointments, and undergraduate initiatives. At Cornell College, Phil taught a variety of language and classical studies courses and held numerous elected and appointed posts, including chair of Classical and Modern Languages department, chair of the faculty salary committee, and chair/program advisor of Classical Studies and Archaeology. He also served as a member of the Dean’s Curriculum Advisory Committee and worked on different strategic initiatives and assessment. Phil is the author of Honor Among Thieves: Craftsmen, Merchants, and Associations in Roman and Late Roman Egypt (University of Michigan, 2016), and has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and Dumbarton Oaks. He received his BA, MA, and PhD degrees in Classics from the Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago. During his time as a graduate student, he also served terms as the associate student ombudsperson (2003-2004) and student ombudsperson (2004-2005).
Bryan Whitchurch: Bryan Whitchurch is an experienced educator in K-12 environments. He holds a BA in History from Utah State University (2005), an MAT in Latin and Classical Humanities from UMASS Amherst (2007), and an MA as well as a PhD in Classical Philology from Fordham University (2019). He also maintains an active professional grade teaching license. Prior to his recently completed doctoral studies he taught for six years in public high schools including Boston Latin School and Brooklyn Latin School. He is currently employed as a Resident Classicist and Teacher at Washington Latin School where in addition to a reduced teaching load he is working with a team to build a new branch of the school in Washington DC.