It’s a busy season for Classics grad student Kathryn Stutz.
This June, Kathryn will present a paper titled “Pour on Their Ears a Language Half Forgot: Eleanor Anne Porden’s Polar Acoustics,” at the Unquiet Shores conference Coastal Acoustics and the Terpsichorean Ocean, hosted by Edinburgh Napier University. This talk will explore the classical elements of The Arctic Expeditions, a poem by a fantastic and underappreciated Romantic poet—Eleanor Anne Porden—who was a contemporary of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. Kathryn is looking into how Porden blends her extensive knowledge of classical literature and cutting-edge science to depict British polar explorers as epic heroes for a new age.
Further success follows, as Kathryn will join two graduate students from History as a Stern Center Graduate Student Curatorial Fellow next year. She is excited to work with rare books in person, especially the Stern Center’s collections on the following areas:
- (1) materials depicting excavation in Italy, and especially in the Naples region, since teaching the history of Pompeii and Herculaneum formed such an exciting part of her time as a Teaching Fellow at the Centro in Rome last year;
- (2) materials related to the early history of Maryland, a topic in which she became invested when she was a member of Prof. Anderson’s Peabody Cast Collection Lab;
- (3) scientific ephemera and voyage narratives, especially those about the far North from the Renaissance onwards.
Thirdly, Kathryn has had an abstract accepted for Dr. Chris Gipson’s panel, Cannibalism and Anthropophagy in the Ancient World, at SCS 2026 in San Francisco. Her paper will be based on a section of her dissertation, titled “Cold and Storm and Cannibals: Or, Why Cannibalism Studies Needs Polar Classics.” (She is also plotting a small cannibalism-themed field trip to a famous historical cemetery in San Francisco, where one of the most infamous members of the Donner Party—one of the grimmest episodes in California’s history of survival cannibalism—was buried.)
Congratulations to Kathryn on these successful ventures!
