Kathryn H. Stutz earned dual Bachelor’s degrees in Classics and in Sociology & Anthropology at the University of Puget Sound in 2018. As a PhD student of Classics at Johns Hopkins since 2019, Kathryn has been investigating the uses and abuses of ancient Greek and Roman voyage narratives during the nineteenth-century age of imperial exploration at the edges of the earth, laying the groundwork for a dissertation within this new subfield of “Polar Classics.”

Kathryn also writes about the afterlives of Roman politician Marcus Tullius Cicero, including the chapter “Law & Orator: Depicting Cicero through Modern Mystery Fiction,” for the De Gruyter volume Portraying Cicero in Literature, Culture, and Politics. Similarly, Kathryn has worked to trace threads of the classical past within the writings of J.R.R. Tolkien, leading to an article for the journal thersites, “G.B. Smith’s ‘Elzevir Cicero’ and the Construction of Queer Immortality in Tolkien’s Mythopoeia.” Some of Kathryn’s other academic pursuits include creative translation of ancient poetry, as well as analysis of Greco-Roman myths on stage, from the stage-plays of Anne Carson to the Broadway musical Hadestown. Across these diverse classical reception interests, Kathryn’s research broadly considers questions of gender, sexuality, and colonialism, from antiquity to the present day.