Stephen Sansom

Assistant Professor
Profile image of Dr. Stephen Sansom
119 Dodd

Stephen Sansom is a Hellenist specializing in early Greek poetry and its reception, especially epic, aesthetics, and digital humanities. He received his PhD in Classics from Stanford University in 2018 and was a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University before joining the Department of Classics at Florida State University. 

His research focuses on how early Greek poetry represents lived experience and how we can model its work. His monograph project, Hesiod’s Shield and the Technology of Wonder, is the first book-length investigation into the role of the Shield of Heracles in Hesiod’s cosmology. Instead of debating the Shield’s authorship—a roadblock that has stymied the poem since antiquity—this book shows how the Shield mobilizes affect and media, such as speech, ekphrasis, and the senses, to flesh out the cosmos of Zeus. His second book, provisionally titled Patterns of Expectancy in Greek Epic: Where Words Belong, uses data science and close reading to explore the meanings generated by the metrical position of words over the thousand-year history of Greek hexameter poetry. He is also archivist and researcher for an ongoing ethnopoetic project on oral poets of rural Crete and is currently analyzing live recordings of Cretan singers gathered in 2005 by a team of US and Greek scholars. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the American Journal of PhilologyTAPAClassical QuarterlyGreece & RomeMnemosyneClassical WorldClassical PhilologyClassical ReviewJournal for Hellenic StudiesCJ-OnlineBMCREidolon, and for the Society for Classical Studies. Past projects include a digital map of Greek lyricadapting Aristophanes in Silicon Valleya MOOC on collegiate athletics, conference papers on archaic Greek poetics, and adaptations of ancient Greek and Roman comedy

 

Website @stephensansom.com, tweets @sasansom, uploads @Academia, profile @GoogleScholar, connect @Linkedin, and code @Github


Select Publications:

"Achilles and the Resources of Genre: Epitaph, Hymnos, and Paean in Iliad 22.386–94" Classical Philology (Forthcoming 2024)

"SEDES: Metrical Position in Greek Hexameter” with David Fifield, Digital Humanities Quarterly (2023) 17.2

"Active Techniques to Enhance Conceptual Learning in Greek Mythology" with Todd Clary and Carolyn Aslan, Classical World (2022) 116.1: 75–105.

"Divine Resonance in Early Greek Epic: Space, Knowledge, Affect" American Journal of Philology (2021) 142.4: 535–69.

"Sedes as Style in Greek Hexameter: a Computational Approach" TAPA (2021) 151.2: 439–67.

"'Strange' Rhetoric and Homeric Reception in Aelius Aristides' Embassy Speech to Achilles (or. 52)" Greece & Rome (2021) 68.2: 278–93.

"Pompey, Venus, and the Politics of Hesiod in Lucan's Bellum Civile 8.456-59" Classical Quarterly (2021) 70.2: 784–91.

"Typhonic Voices: Sounds of Hesiod and Cosmic War in Lucan's Bellum Civile 6.685-94" Mnemosyne (2020) 73.4: 609-32.

Review: One man show: poetics and presence in the Iliad and Odyssey. Hellenic Studies 78 (Washington, DC 2020) by Katherine KretlerBMCR 2022.10.09

Review: Achilles Unbound: Multiformity and Tradition in the Homeric Epics (Cambridge, MA 2019) by Casey Dué. Center for Hellenic Studies PressClassical Philology (2021) 116.1: 135-9.

Review: Hesiod, Vols. I and II. (2018) By Glenn W. Most, ed. and trans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2018CJ-Online, 2020.01.05

Review: The Reception of the Homeric Hymns (Oxford 2016) Eds. A. Faulkner, A. Vergados, and A. SchwabBMCR 2018.03.60

Research Interests
Greek Poetry - Digital Humanities