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 2023-2024 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).
Her 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?
Forthcoming articles include a piece on minor characters in the Aeneid (the Cretan Pholoe in Aen. 5 and Cretheus the Bard in Aen. 9) with the New England Classical Journal for its Spring 2024 issue, as well as a chapter, titled “per sororis commendationem servasti: Octavia Minor’s Cultural Influence in the Roman Principate,” which is currently under preparation for a volume (Women, Wealth, and Power in the Roman Republic, eds. Steel and Webb) with Cambridge University Press.
Her language teaching profile leans towards the Latin side (including courses from beginning Latin to advanced level courses such as Augustan Poetry and Classical Prose selections from Cicero and Suetonius) 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.”