Emily Chow-Kambitsch
About:
Emily Chow-Kambitsch is a Santa Barbara native and a UCSB alumna. After completing her BA in Classics (Languages and Literature) at UCSB in 2010, she worked in a local educational non-profit, leading social and emotional learning workshops for teens. She then returned to the world of classics abroad, receiving a Master’s degree in classical language and literature from the University of Oxford, where she completed a dissertation on the healing of grief in Seneca’s consolatory writings, and worked as a research assistant for the Oxford Emotions Project, a cross-disciplinary exploration of cultural definitions of emotions in ancient Greece.
In 2016 Emily received her PhD in Classics at University College London, where she gained a research specialty in classical reception studies. Her dissertation, ‘Emotions in Ben-Hur’, provides a detailed case study for examining the role of emotions as an important mode for audience/reader engagement with representations of antiquity in modern popular fiction, theatre, and cinema. She has since published chapters and articles from this research in publications including the journal Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film, and the collection Rewriting the Ancient World: Greeks, Romans, Jews and Christians in Modern Popular Fiction (Brill, 2017).
Emily also has a keen interest in expanding the conventions of ancient language pedagogy (itself an influential form of classical reception), and in London in June 2017 hosted an immersive workshop in Living Latin, the practice of learning and using Latin actively.