Stephen Sansom

Stephen Sansom is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics. He specializes 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 work has been supported by Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies (Washington, DC), the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens.

His research investigates Greek epic from literary, computational, and comparativist perspectives. His first monograph project, Hesiod’s Shield of Heracles and the Aesthetics of Olympus, situates the Shield of Heracles in the political aesthetics of Hesiod’s cosmos. His second book project, Patterns of Expectancy in Greek Epic, 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 archivist and researcher for an ongoing ethnopoetic project on oral poetry of western Crete and co-organizes a conference series, Metri Causa, on new approaches to ancient meter, hosted by the University of Cambridge in 2023 and 2024. His articles and reviews have appeared in the American Journal of Philology; TAPA; Classical Philology; Classical Quarterly; Digital Humanities Quarterly; Greece & Rome; Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies; Mnemosyne; Classical World; Classical Review; Journal for Hellenic Studies; CJ-Online; BMCR; Eidolon; and for the Society for Classical Studies.

Website @stephensansom.com, code @Github, uploads @Academia, profile @GoogleScholar and @ORCID, connect @Linkedin, and CV here.

He is currently accepting graduate students.

Select Publications:

“The Hesiodic Shield of Heracles and Archaic Intertextuality” The Cambridge Companion to Hesiod, eds. C. Landis and R. Hunter (In Preparation).

"Breaking Hermann’s Bridge from Homer to Nonnus: Towards a Stylometry of Caesurae" Classical Quarterly (2025).

"Epic Rhythm: Metrical Shapes in Greek Hexameter" with David Fifield, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies (2024) 64.3: 350–77.

"Achilles and the Resources of Genre: Epitaph, Hymnos, and Paean in Iliad 22.386–94" Classical Philology (2024) 199.1: 1–28.

"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 (2020) 70.2: 784–91.

"Typhonic Voices: Sounds of Hesiod and Cosmic War in Lucan's Bellum Civile 6.685-94" Mnemosyne (2019) 73.4: 609-32.