Yanneck Wiegers, PhD student in Classics, won a research fellowship at the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute for Spring 2025 to collaborate with colleagues from a wide range of academic backgrounds.

The fellowship will allow him to complete his dissertation project Hic Labor Est. Rome and the Crises of Creativity. It makes a case for reevaluating the Romans’ great investment in explorations of the creative act. Our modern term “creativity” is a relatively recent coinage, and only emerged around the turn of the nineteenth century alongside significant hostility toward Latin literature. By retracing Roman thought and its afterlife, Yanneck’s work attempts to enrich contemporary challenges to human creativity.