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Career Networking Event

Sponsored by SCS

Saturday January 7, 2023: 1:00-3:00PM CST

In response to the shifting job market for Classics and Archaeology PhDs, the Society for Classical Studies will hold a virtual Career Networking event at the 2023 annual AIA-SCS meeting. This event will allow for graduate students, contingent faculty, and others who are interested to meet with graduates of Classics and Ancient Studies MA / PhD programs whose primary career is not, or has not been, teaching and research at the college and university level.

This speed dating-like event will take place on zoom from 1-3pm CST on January 7. To attend this event, you must be registered for the annual meeting and sign up for the event, as capacity is limited.

Pre-registered attendees 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 2023 Annual Meeting, but you must sign up using the form linked below.

The biographies of confirmed networkers that will be in attendance are below.

How to Sign Up:

You must sign up for this event by filling out this form: https://forms.gle/6b8UQnjV4Qv9bY8p8

Networker Biographies

Rebecca Brown: As Assistant Director for Graduate Student Programming at the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University, Rebecca plays a key role in training, mentoring, and creating resources for graduate student teachers. She is especially interested in supporting teachers in the humanities and social sciences. Rebecca leads seminars, workshops, and consultations on discussion leading, teaching with images and objects, and professional development for graduate students as teachers and scholars. She enjoys integrating topics from her academic research, in particular the relationship between texts, objects, and material culture in Greek and Roman antiquity, to her work in teaching and learning. 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 teachers on the thoughtful and effective integration of educational technologies into their courses. She earned her PhD in Classical Philology at Harvard University, as well as her MA from the University of Oxford and BA from Georgetown University, both in the Classics.

Jeff Cohen: Jeff has fifteen years of experience advising foundations, nonprofit organizations, and corporations on strategy, program design, and evaluation, and supporting cross-sector collaboration efforts. He is currently Managing Director in the Seattle office of FSG, a global social impact consulting firm specializing in strategy, evaluation, and research. Jeff leads FSG’s Education impact area and the Seattle office. Jeff's client work has focused on strategic planning for private, community, and corporate foundations and nonprofit organizations as well as building and supporting cross-sector collaboratives. Particular interests include fostering greater equity in the US education system, creating healthy communities, and supporting place-based approaches to social change. Jeff writes extensively on issues in US education, with a focus on innovation and increasing access and opportunity for underserved populations, and speaks regularly on collective impact, effective collaboration, catalytic philanthropy, and improving education outcomes.

Emily Cook: Emily Beugelmans Cook is currently a member of the Go-To-Market Enablement team at Lattice, an HR technology startup based in San Francisco. Before joining Lattice she held roles in lifestyle public relations and instructional design. Emily holds a B.A. in Classical Civilization from UCLA and a M.A. in Classics from Vanderbilt University.

Matthew Loar: Matthew Loar has his BA in Classics from Washington and Lee University, his Master’s (M.St.) in Women’s Studies from the University of Oxford, and his PhD in Classics from Stanford University. From 2015 to 2016 he was a Lecturer of Classics at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and then from 2016 until 2019 he was a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies in the same department. Since July 2019 he has been Director of Fellowships at Washington and Lee University, and since July 2022 he has also been Director of The Beinecke Scholarship Program, administering a nationally competitive fellowship that supports students intending to pursue research-based or creative graduate study in the arts, humanities, or social sciences.

Jonathan MacLellan: Jonathan MacLellan is an Associate at McKinsey & Company, where he has worked on learning program delivery and design teams at McKinsey Academy to build learning programs that helps clients build capabilities and accelerate organizational transformations. Prior to joining McKinsey, he was a Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy and Classics Department at U.T. San Antonio, and received his M.A. and PhD in Classics from U.T. Austin.

Jeremy Ott: Jeremy Ott is Classics and Germanic Studies Librarian at UC Berkeley, where he oversees library collections and services across the breadth of the Classical Greco-Roman world as well as Byzantine civilization, and on German-speaking countries and their Dutch and Nordic neighbors. He received his PhD from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in 2016, and during much of his graduate career worked in libraries and archives including NYU's Grey Fine Arts Library and IFA Aphrodisias Archive, the library of the American Research Center in Sofia, and the Blegen Library of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. He maintains research interests in Late Antique archaeology and the history of scholarship.

Ariane Schwartz: Ariane Schwartz works for the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, where she helps clients build capabilities and accelerate organizational transformations on the Digital Delivery 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 and RSA 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.

Kurtis Tanaka: Kurtis Tanaka, PhD. is Program Manager for Justice Initiatives at Ithaka S+R. At Ithaka S+R he has led numerous projects on increasing access to and the quality of higher education opportunities in U.S. prisons. His work is broadly framed around the question of how people access information, through this lens exploring the role of technology in higher education in prisons and the impact of Departments of Corrections’ media review policies, censorship, self-censorship, and digital surveillance on educational quality. Beyond higher education in prisons, Kurtis works with academic libraries, publishers, and museums to help them better serve their users and communities. Kurtis holds a bachelor’s degree in classical languages from the University of California, Berkeley and a doctorate in the art and archaeology of the Mediterranean world from the University of Pennsylvania.

Bryan Whitchurch: Bryan Whitchurch is an educator with 17 years of teaching experience in a variety of settings. After completing a PhD and MA in classics from Fordham University (2019), he returned to employment in K-12 schools. Some years prior to the PhD, he completed an MAT in Latin and Classical Humanities at UMASS Amherst and a BA in History at Utah State University. He currently serves as Department Chair of Classics at Washington Latin School in Washington DC where on any given day approximately 700 students learn Latin (and for a few students, even some Greek). His long term career plan is to create a Latin school of his own in the Intermountain West.