Bringing Ancient Languages to Life

Cynthia Liu is a third year DPhil candidate at Jesus College writing her doctoral thesis on the role of mystery language and imagery in Greek and Roman poetry. Though she grew up with Ancient Greek and Latin, she only began speaking them when she joined the Oxford Latinitas Project in 2018 during her MSt at Brasenose College. Before coming to Oxford, Cynthia received her B.A. (summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) from Baylor University in Classics and Linguistics. Along with reading and teaching Latin and Greek, she is passionate about music, dance, and food.

Alwaleed Alsaggaf was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and lived there until the age of 16 when he moved to London to pursue his studies. Having received his IB diploma in 2015, he went to Birkbeck, University of London to read philosophy, and graduated from there in 2019. After finishing his first year at Birkbeck, he went to study Latin and Greek at the Accademia Vivarium Novum in 2016-2017. Alwaleed is now an MA researcher in Ancient Philosophy at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU), Munich, where he also currently teaches a course entitled “Latin for Philosophers”. He previously worked as a teacher of Latin language and literature at Eton College for two years.

His main research interests are ancient philosophy and its reception in the Arabic and Latin world, as well as contemporary analytic philosophy. Alwaleed is also passionate about Latin composition and teaching philosophy in Latin.

Ayelet Wenger teaches the OLP introduction to spoken Latin and was the coordinator of Septimana Latina 2020. She spent two years studying classical rabbinic literature in Israel, received her B.A. in Classics, summa cum laude, from Princeton University, and is now pursuing a postgraduate career in Judaism and Christianity in the Graeco-Roman World. Her thesis analyzes Septuagintalisms in the Gospel of Luke. Ayelet loves backpacking and other forms of wandering, Derek Walcott, and frequentatives.

Jason is a doctoral student at Magdalen College, Oxford, working on questions of local tradition in early Greek hexameter poetry. They were the co-leader of the Vergil reading group for a year, and currently teach spoken Attic Greek. Jason is also interested in linguistics, metre, and Hittite literature, and is a devout follower of writing macrons in Latin texts. Their favourite place to be is the Lower Reading Room of the Bodleian library.

Jessi (Aurelia) is a PhD student in the Classics department at the University of Cambridge. Previously, she spent two years teaching at Winchester College after completing a Master’s in Classics at Oxford and an A.B. in English (with a Classics secondary) at Harvard. She is interested in the long history of classical epic poetry, especially its reception in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; in the relationship between English and classical literary canons; and most of all in teaching, which is her greatest joy.

Pierre Gorsky-Mièze has long been enamoured of Latin, which he has studied for over 14 years. After 3 years taking classes préparatoires aux grandes écoles, he spent 2 years in Italy learning and teaching using the direct method. He is passionate about spreading the knowledge of Classics, having been a member of the Human-Hist society for over 8 years and a co-founder of Schola Sorbonae, a society based in Paris and aiming to promote the studies of Latin and its culture. Pierre is currently studying for a master’s degree in Political Philosophy and Ethics at Lettres Sorbonne, where he is writing a thesis on the extent to which ethics should be taught at schools.

Simon is a third-year Mathematics undergraduate who spends too much time reconstructing Plautine Latin phonology. Having only had a term’s worth of Latin grammar when he joined Latinitas, he was very impressed with how effective the direct method was, and now is looking into the methodological issues of using a reconstructed pronunciation in class. Simon is also interested in the history of natural philosophy and is currently writing a paper on ancient planetary motion models. He likes connecting relatives, Archilochus, Merovingian Latin and irregular plurals.

Yaamir Badhe is a third year undergraduate Classicist at Jesus College. He was first exposed to speaking Latin on the 2019 Septimana Latina in Rome and now organises and co-leads the Vergil reading group. His interests in the Classical world include Greek tragedy and Hellenistic history, especially the Indo-Greeks and Greco-Buddhism. He enjoys speaking ancient languages not least because of the increased reading fluency the direct method affords, but also because it makes him feel like a character from one of his favourite modern novels, Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’.

Diana Pont Puig (Valencia, Spain) received a BS in Classics from Universitat de València and a MA in High School education with a focus on Greek and Latin teaching from the same University. Then, she devoted herself to learning and teaching Ancient Greek as a living language. Since 2019, she has combined working in public high schools in Spain with teaching for Polis, Cultura Clásica, and other institutions that provide active language teaching in Greek.
At Oxford Latinitas, Diana teaches Ancient Greek beginners and enjoys introducing people to this fascinating world.
In her free time, she loves to read Greek quietly or perform traditional activities of her land, such as playing Pilota Valenciana or doing human pyramids, called Muixeranga.