Executive Committee

Aileen Das, President

Aileen Das is an associate professor in Classical Studies and Middle East Studies at the University of Michigan. As an intellectual historian, her research foregrounds medieval Islamicate thinkers’ creative reinterpretation of Greco-Roman medical and philosophical ideas in their pursuit of their own epistemic ambitions. Aileen’s first book, Galen and the Arabic Reception of Plato’s Timaeus (Cambridge University Press, 2020), studies how Galen’s interpretation of Plato’s cosmological dialogue the Timaeus became a touchstone for medieval Islamicate doctors and philosophers’ refiguring of their respective disciplines. Her faculty profile can be found here. Email: ardas@umich.edu 

Calloway Scott, Vice-President

Calloway is an assistant professor of Greek history at the University of Cincinnati. His work broadly examines the entanglements of science and society in Greek antiquity, from the healing cults of Asklepios to the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus. You can find his full CV here . Email: calloway.scott@uc.edu

Colin Webster, Co-Editor of The Rootcutter


Colin is an associate professor of Classics at UC Davis. His research focuses on science, technology and medicine in Greco-Roman antiquity. His first book, Tools and the Organism, traces the emergence of the "organism" in Greek medical thought and places this alongside the specific investigative tools that ancient practitioners used to articulate the body. He was the Society's President from 2020–2023. His full bio and CV can be found here. Email: cwebster@ucdavis.edu

Anna Freidin, Co-Editor of The Rootcutter


Anna is an assistant professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is a Roman historian whose work focuses on gender, childbearing, domesticity, and science and medicine. Her first book, Birthing Romans: Childbearing and its Risks in Imperial Rome, examines how people constructed and tried to mitigate the dangers of childbearing. She is currently working on a new social and cultural history of Roman foodways, especially how bread shaped Romans’ daily lives and concepts of material and metaphysical transformation. Her faculty profile can be found here. Email: freidin@umich.edu


Malina Buturović, Treasurer

Malina Ćirić Buturović is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at Yale. Her work explores the interrelations between ancient Graeco-Roman scientific, philosophical, and cultural conceptions of the body.

Her current project, The Transmission of Fault: Heredity Between Medicine and Theology, traces the entangled histories of Graeco-Roman medicine and philosophy forward and backward from the world of ‘Imperial Greek.’ Through readings of Plutarch, Galen, and their contemporaries on questions of heredity, ancestral fault, and intergenerational responsibility, she argues for the mutual shaping of humanistic and medical discourse in antiquity and for the continuing repercussions of this entanglement in modern thought.

Yanneck Wiegers, Graduate Student

Yanneck is a PhD student in Classics at Johns Hopkins University. His research interests are centered around ideas and theories of creativity in Latin literature.

In his dissertation, he studies the Romans’ great investment in explorations of the nature of creativity. Besides, he works in the history of biology, particularly genetics, which begins to intersect more and more with his primary area of study.

Full profile can be found here.

Email: yanneck.wiegers@jhu.edu

Michiel Meeusen, Early Career Member

Michiel Meeusen (PhD KU Leuven 2013) specialises in ancient science, medicine and technology, and the literature and culture of the High Roman Empire. His current research focuses on the interaction between medical culture and learned society in this period, and he is also working, i.a., on a conference volume, ‘The Healing Classics: Medical Humanities and the Graeco-Roman Tradition’ (under contract with Peter Lang).

Previous Presidents

Colin Webster (UC Davis)

Courtney Roby (Cornell)

Brooke Holmes (Princeton)

Ralph Rosen (UPenn)

Rebecca Flemming (Exeter)

Julie Laskaris (Richmond)

Lesley Dean-Jones (UT Austin)

Laurence Bliquez (Washington)

Heinrich von Staden (IAS)

John Scarborough (Wisconsin-Madison)