The Classics Department is Excited to Announce Two New Faculty Hires in Ancient History and Greek Philology

Matthijs Wibier (2014 PhD in Classics from St. Andrews) will be joining us in the fall. He is a Roman cultural and intellectual historian with a specialization in Roman law and a broad interest in Roman politics and government. Matthijs can boast a long list of publications already. He is currently working on a monograph on the Roman legal experts in the early Empire as well as on a collective volume on the transmission of Roman law in Late Antiquity. Matthijs is originally from the Netherlands (2010 MA in Classics from Leiden University) and has been teaching at the University of Kent since 2018. Earlier he spent a few years each at Penn State and the University of Pavia. We wish Matthijs welcome in what has now officially become the Classics department with the highest concentration of ancient historians in the US! He is eager to take on graduate students interested in Roman history.

Dylan Kenny comes to Cincinnati from the University of California, Berkeley, where he has recently completed his PhD on the early fifth-century poet Pindar. Dylan was attracted to Classics through its modern reception in pictorial art, the early days of the printing press, and ideologies of work. His current research addresses the intersections between Pindar’s poetry and philosophical discourses of the early fifth century BCE. Whereas recent generations of scholars have isolated Pindar from his contemporaries and read his poetry as a strange kind of archaic residue, rich as it is in complex symbolism, Dylan builds on early-modern scholarly opinion that Pindar was a serious ethicist and political advisor to show that he was conversant also with most major philosophical topics of his day. In his earlier work, Dylan edited a collection of essays on the Victorian art critic Vernon Lee, wrote a prize-winning thesis on the early modern painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder, wrote a prize-winning MA thesis on Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus, and wrote a second MA thesis on the Renaissance publisher Henri Estienne of Geneva. Dylan grew up near Fresno, California, and completed the two-year liberal arts program at Deep Springs College, a two-year liberal arts college in the California dessert that integrates sustenance labor with readings from the European tradition. He subsequently earned his BA at Yale, continued his studies of Classics and Early Modern History on a three-year fellowship for post-graduate study at the University of Cambridge, and returned to Berkeley for his PhD in Classics.