Keep up with all Classics and Religious Studies news, including recent faculty awards, research, and accomplishments on the OHIO Today news site.
Classics and Religious Studies Research & Scholarship
Classics and Religious Studies Research & Scholarship
Ohio University's Classics and Religious Studies (CARS) department is comprised of award-winning faculty members, who have extensive expertise in their fields. Faculty members have published multiple referred articles in top-rated journals. Since 2017, they have authored or co-authored 16 books among them.
CARS faculty are very dedicated to the success of their students and offer them many research opportunities. As a smaller department, faculty and students get to know each other well, fostering a welcoming and engaging community.
Presidential Researchers
Loren Lybarger in '24-25 and Neil Bernstein in '22-23
Fred Drogula Wins National Award for Teaching Excellence
Excellence He has dramatically enhanced student engagement with the ancient world by creating new courses and a new club focused on monster literature.
Recent Faculty Accomplishments
Click each faculty member to review their latest accomplishments.
Professor
Neal Bernstein
Professor
Neal Bernstein
- Neil Bernstein’s most recent book, Poppaea Sabina: The Life and Afterlife of a Roman Empress (Oxford, 2025), was published on June 20.
- His book chapter: “Latin Sophists and Rhetors From the Age of Trajan to the Age of Constantine,” also recently appeared in The Cambridge History of Later Latin Literature, ed. Gavin Kelly and Aaron Pelttari. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025).
- He has received a contract from Oxford to publish Statius, Thebaid 6: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary, co-authored with Antony Augoustakis.
- He delivered a paper at UC-Davis on Lucan's Bellum Civile in March 2025.
- He will give a paper at Vanderbilt in October 2025 on Statius's Thebaid.
Visiting Assistant Professor
Haley Bertram
Visiting Assistant Professor
Haley Bertram
- Haley Bertram presented “Corinthian Ceramics at Syracuse: Re-Framing the Narrative” at the Corinth and Syracuse: A Two Way Relationship conference in Syracuse, Sicily, and submitted it for the proceedings.
- Haley Bertram joins the department as a Visiting Assistant Professor after serving as a Resident Instructor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. She earned her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cincinnati in fall 2024, with a dissertation titled “Producing for the Mediterranean World: Corinthian Pottery Abroad, 750–500 BCE.”
- Over the summer, she returned to Arma, Greece as senior staff with the Eastern Boeotia Archaeological Project (EBAP).
- She continued investigations of terracotta figurines from Ancient Eleon for a catalogue publication and helped organize the University of Victoria’s undergraduate field practicum.
- She also undertook research in Ancient Corinth to revise her dissertation’s early chapters into an article for submission to Hesperia.
Professor
Brian Collins
Professor
Brian Collins
- Brian Collins is Co-Editing Routledge Companion to the Mahābhārat.
- He taught his popular online course CARS 2410: The Global Occult during the second summer session.
- He contributed entries on Raymond Buckland (Seax Wicca founder) and the Church of All Worlds for an upcoming exhibit at New York City’s Museum of Sex
- Collins submitted a 5,000-word essay on sacrifice in Hinduism and Buddhism for the Bloomsbury Handbook of Mimetic Theory.
- He also conducted interviews and attended a music festival in Buena Vista, CO, for research on his new book, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard’s Metamodern Music and Mythology.
Associate Professor
Cory Crawford
Associate Professor
Cory Crawford
- Cory Crawford delivered an invited lecture at Yale Divinity School in April titled “Who’s Afraid of a Female Priest? Biblical Narratives Confront Kenite Traditions.”
- He presented three research papers:
- at Cambridge University on “Alphabets in a World of Hieroglyphs,” to be published in an edited volume
- at the American Society for Overseas Research on “Hazor Ceramic Rattles and the Sensory Experience of Cult,” to be submitted to an archaeological journal
- and at Boston College’s “Graphic Signs of Religion in Antiquity” conference on “Iconic Politics and the Philosophy of Perception.”
- In May, he led the Ping Institute Summer Seminar for regional high school teachers on ancient writing systems.
- Over the summer, he served as field supervisor for the Türkmen-Karahöyük Archaeological Project in Turkey, accompanied by three OHIO students, with findings to be presented and submitted for publication this fall.
Professor
Fred Drogula
Professor
Fred Drogula
- Fred Drogula was awarded the Society for Classical Studies Excellence in Teaching Award.
- He was also awarded OHIO's Jeanette Grasselli Brown Teaching Award in Arts and Sciences.
- He has a new book forthcoming from Oxford University Press titled Spheres of Control: The Origins of Government in Early Rome, which provides a new reconstruction for the formation of the Roman Republic.
- He also has a related article forthcoming from the American Journal of Philology titled “The Origins of Law in Early Rome,” which challenges traditional views on how the Roman legal system developed.
- He has been invited to give a paper in Oxford (UK) this fall exploring the intellectual history of Roman concepts of authority.
Professor and Department Chair
Loren Lybarger
Professor and Department Chair
Loren Lybarger
- Loren Lybarger delivered an invited lecture at the University of Oslo in June titled “Religion and Identity in the Palestinian North Atlantic: Chicago, Copenhagen, and Oslo.” The talk reported findings from his current research on Palestinian refugee and immigrant experiences in Scandinavia.
- He continued his fieldwork in Oslo and Copenhagen over the summer.
- In February 2025, he gave the keynote address at the 11th Annual Middle East and North African Studies Symposium at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, OR. The talk, titled “Transcending Catastrophes: Transformations of Palestinian Identities Since the First Intifada,” drew from his research in the Middle East, North America, and Northern Europe.
Associate Professor
Myrna Perez
Associate Professor
Myrna Perez
- Myrna Perez completed a fellowship at the Linda Hall Library of Science and Technology and was elected a fellow of the International Society for Science and Religion.
- She published Criticizing Science: Stephen Jay Gould and the Struggle for American Democracy (John Hopkins University Press).
- She authored:
- “The Colonial Life of Sociobiology” (Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences)
- and “Taller Than a T‑Rex” in Greedy Science: Creating Knowledge, Making Money, and Being Famous in the 1980s (John Hopkins University Press).
- She gave invited talks at:
- the Penn (“Christian Nationalism and the Afterlives of Scopes”),
- Yale and Denison (“Criticizing Science”),
- and Vassar (panelist, “Science & the Culture Wars”).
- She delivered the keynote address at the University of Erfurt’s “Truth Politics Between Science and Society” conference.