Elizabeth Heintges
Graduate Student
emh2130@columbia.edu
Interests
Latin literature
Hellenistic and Roman Sicily
Roman Republican history
War and cultural memory
Numismatics
Elizabeth Heintges is a Ph.D. candidate in Classics. Her research focuses on Hellenistic and Roman Sicily (from both literary and historical perspectives), Latin poetry, and the cultural memory of warfare. Her dissertation, provisionally titled “Vergil’s Sicily: Reflections of Crisis and Reintegration in the Late Republican Civil Wars,” reevaluates the significance of the Bellum Siculum and Sextus Pompey’s control of the island of Sicily during the second triumvirate and traces the impact of that conflict in shaping cultural, political, and poetic responses to the province through the Augustan period. Elizabeth presented an early portion of her dissertation research for the inaugural SAIG (AIA) and GSC (SCS) Annual Dissertation Lecture in 2021. An article on Sicilian landscape in Claudian’s de raptu Proserpinae, stemming from her M.Phil. work, has been published in Arethusa.
Beyond Sicily, Elizabeth has interests in Roman numismatics, epigraphy, and the history of collections. Since 2018, she has been part of a collaborative project to study, catalogue, and publish the Olcott Collection of Roman and Provincial Coins at Columbia; she is in the process of writing the introduction to and catalogue of the republican coinage, as well as a chapter on the collection’s provenance, for publication. She has also previously contributed to digital editions of unpublished Latin and Greek inscriptions at Columbia for the U.S. Epigraphy Project and worked on early twentieth-century archival material associated with the Columbia papyrus collection as a recipient of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s Graduate Student Internship in Primary Sources.
At Columbia, Elizabeth has taught Literature Humanities as a Preceptor in the Core Curriculum and Beginning and Intermediate Latin and Greek as a Teaching Fellow in Classics; she has also served as a Teaching Assistant for courses in Classical Civilization and facilitated workshops on pedagogy through the department as well as the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning. Beyond the classroom, she has excavated at Morgantina (Sicily), Hadrian’s Villa (Tivoli, Italy), and Iklaina (Pylos, Greece). Elizabeth also has a keen interest in ancient drama and performance; she participated in the 2023 NEH Institute on the performance of Roman comedy and has acted/sung in multiple productions in ancient Greek with the Barnard/Columbia Ancient Drama Group: past roles include Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis, Herakles in Sophocles’ Trachiniae, Creusa in Euripides’ Ion, and the Nurse/Chorus in Aeschylus’ Choephoroi (videos linked).
Selected Publications
E. Heintges, “What is dead may never die: Sicilian regeneration in Claudian’s De raptu Proserpinae.” Arethusa 54.3 (2021 [publ. 2022]): 425–54.
N. Nicholson and E. Heintges, “Aging, Athletics, and Epinician.” Nikephoros 23 (2010 [publ. 2012]): 105–38.