Dani Poortinga
About:
I earned my BA in History in Fall of 2020, my MA in History in Spring of 2023, and my MA in Classics in Spring of 2025, all at San Francisco State University. My interests are wide-ranging (and unwieldy), but the bulk of my research and passion lies with love, sex, women (especially unusual or “improper” women), and “the gaze” in the Roman world as seen in poetry and drama. As such, my reading experience has been mostly with Catullus and Ovid, but I pledged my fealty to ancient depictions of love because of Dido as depicted in Vergil’s Aeneid (ask me about my Dido tattoo!). I certainly consider myself a philologist, but cannot deny the intrigue (and, honestly, hilarity) of the Roman fascinum, as well as sexually-suggestive graffiti at Pompeii and Herculaneum.
The discipline of Classics has meaning for me partially because it has deep roots. For as long as we have been singing, for as long as we have been writing, we have been telling stories about similar characters and events – within the last couple years alone we’ve had the king of the gods portrayed by Russell Crowe (Thor: Love and Thunder, 2022), Lance Reddick (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, 2023-), and Jeff Goldblum (Kaos, 2024). These stories and characters have stayed relevant and popular for as long as they’ve existed! In addition, despite a separation of thousands of years, we are still the same species, and our feelings have not changed; Catullus 85 (“I hate and I love…”) can be relevant to anyone in a messy situationship today. Though time keeps passing, the feelings, thoughts, and concepts documented in Classical art and literature stay gold.