Interests
Latin and Greek Literature of the Late Republic and Early Empire (1st century BCE–1st century CE)
Gender Studies in Antiquity (especially sisterhood and representation of female voices)
Intertextuality
Reception
Lien Van Geel received her Ph.D. in Classics in October 2022 from Columbia University, where she continued as an Early Career Fellow in 2022-2023 and as a Lecturer in the discipline of Classics for the 2024-2025 academic year. Her research and teaching focus on Latin and Greek Literature from the late Republic and the early Empire and extend to women and gender studies and reception in the Renaissance.
Her primary research project, provisionally titled “Crafting Roman Women in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives,” has developed from her dissertation titled “Soror Augusti: the Literary Lives and Afterlives of Octavia Minor” (advisors: Katharina Volk and Gareth Williams; defended in June 2022). This book project, “Crafting Roman Women in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives,” is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. The aim of this book is to answer the following questions: how does Plutarch create his Roman women; how does his literary approach compare to that of other historiographers; and how does it affect these women’s reception? Similarly, in the second strand in her research stemming from her dissertation, she currently has a proposal under review for a study of the representations of the imperial family of early Julio-Claudians, particularly the female members directly surrounding emperor Augustus, in Augustan poetry.
She has published articles on the Aeneid and the Metamorphoses in the New England Classical Journal and has book chapters forthcoming on the educational presence of Octavia Minor, female swoons from Homer to Plutarch, trans-epic appearances of Cybele, the (im-)perfect deaths of Antony and Cleopatra in Plutarch, and Plutarch's depictions of (female) stoicism.
Her language teaching profile leans towards the Latin side (including courses from beginning Latin to advanced level courses such as Augustan Poetry, Classical Prose selections from Cicero and Suetonius, Selections of Cicero's Rhetorical works, and a graduate course on the Aeneid) but she has also taught the full Greek elementary sequence. Her teaching experience beyond classical languages is diverse, including courses such as “Worlds of Alexander the Great,” “Literature Humanities: Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy,” and “Gendered Mythology: The Ancient Sources and Their Reception.”
Selected Publications
[Forthcoming] “From Ships to Nymphs: Cybele’s Maternal Metamorphosis in Aen. 9.77-122 and Met. 14.530-65” Vergilius. 2025.
“Minor Characters and Major Value Shifts: the cases of Pholoe the Cretan slave (Aen. 5.281-5) and Cretheus the Bard (Aen. 9.774-7)” NECJ. 2024.