On June 9th, Yanneck Wiegers defended his PhD thesis titled The Organic and the Synthetic. Creativity and Rome (abstract below). Yanneck wrote his thesis with Prof. Shane Butler as advisor, Nandini Pandey as second reader, and Bill Egginton and Richard Bett as external examiners. Yanneck is teaching a final course at Hopkins this summer and then will pick up post as lecturer in the Classics Department at University of Maryland, College Park in August 2025. Cheers, Yanneck!

The Organic and the Synthetic. Creativity and Rome: Modern Western ideas of creativity were shaped in part through a dismissive view of Roman culture. Long seen as derivative and unoriginal, Rome was cast as the antithesis of a supposedly authentic Greek creativity—a perception reinforced by Romanticism and inherited by later literary theory. This thesis reexamines that narrative by exploring how Roman thinkers themselves conceptualized the creative act.            

At the heart of the study is a historical tension between two dominant models of creativity: one to be called “synthetic,” emphasizing the recombination of existing elements; the other “organic,” drawing on metaphors of birth, growth, and embodied development. While Roman literature has often been reduced to a paradigm of the synthetic model, this dissertation advances a different perspective, one bridging these opposing models into a cohesive understanding of creativity.”