Sasha-Mae Eccleston

Dr. Sasha-Mae Eccleston is a literary scholar currently appointed as the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University. Dr. Eccleston’s work very often traces the parameters of human identity, especially in relation to the gendered, racialized, and/or otherwise non-normative body, other creatures, the natural environment, the built environment, and time. Her forthcoming book, Epic Events: Classics and the Politics of Time in the United States since 9/11 (Yale University Press, 2024), explains how contemporary American engagements with Ancient Greek and Roman literature and material culture reveal time as a structural principle in the differential experience and exercise of citizenship. In view of crises that continue to hierarchize life, Epic Events seeks to make a timely case against classical timelessness.

In addition to advancing several research projects, Dr. Eccleston is a program builder who thrives in the intellectual and artistic company of others. She directs the Critical Classical Studies Postdoctoral/MFA fellowship at Brown, a program that aims to develop new approaches to the study of ancient Greek and Roman material by blending scholarly, creative, and other forms of expertise. With 3 other classicists, she co-founded Eos, a scholarly society dedicated to Africana receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome. With Dan-el Padilla Peralta, she co-founded the conference series, Racing the Classics; with the financial support of the Mellon Foundation, they are expanding the scope of that series to include a cohort-based fellowship aimed at advanced graduate students and early career researchers. With Dr. Patrice Rankine, she recently edited TAPA 154.1, a special issue entitled “Race and Racism: Beyond the Spectacular.”

Her honors and achievements include, but are not limited to, a National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize in Ancient Studies, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Rhodes Scholarship.