Hello, my name is Sam. I graduated from the University of Michigan with a BA in Classical Languages and Literature in Spring 2018 and came to Penn in the Fall of the same year. My undergraduate honors thesis, “Threatening the Patriarchy: Socio-Religious Anxiety and Abortion in Classical Athens,” argued against scholarly conclusions that religion was not particularly critical of abortion and showed by analyzing language surrounding the topic of abortion in various ‘literary’ genres such as tragedy, philosophy, forensic speech, and an oath, that religious anxiety correlates with socially constructed gender norms promulgated within a patriarchal society.
In general, my interests tend to lean toward the social-historical. I am always eager to research topics concerning the lives of women and non-elites, magic, religion, and religious networks through an amalgamation of literary, archaeological, and epigraphic sources. My dissertation is a faithful iteration of these core interests, in which I contextualize the curse tablets of Roman Carthage. I have tentatively titled it “Contextualizing the Curse Tablets of Roman Carthage.” You can read more about my project here.