Our Team

Dr Melinda Letts is Instructor in Greek and Latin Languages at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Supernumerary Fellow in Classics at Harris Manchester College. She was for 13 years Tutor in Greek and Latin Languages at Jesus College, where she led the introduction of Active Method teaching of both languages. After graduating with a first class degree in Literae Humaniores from St Anne’s College, Oxford, she worked as Research Assistant to Professor Keith Hopkins, collaborating on a chapter of his bookDeath and Renewal (Cambridge, 1983). She then decided to try life outside academia, working first in overseas development and subsequently in a series of leadership roles in UK health charities and public bodies, for which she was appointed OBE in 2003. She returned to academic life in 2009, and wrote her doctoral thesis at Christ Church Oxford. Melinda is passionate about enabling people from all backgrounds to access ancient languages with ease and fluency, so that they can engage for themselves with the thinking and experience of previous generations and bring their own diverse interpretations to texts that have been read and discussed for millennia.

Jan Preiss grew up in Bohemia and read Classics and Philosophy at New College, Oxford. He took a Congratulatory First in Classics, ranking first across the university in Finals, before going on to complete the BPhil in Philosophy as an Ertegun Scholar. Having learnt Latin through the active method himself, Jan founded Oxford Latinitas in its present form in 2021 and now serves as its CEO. Outside Oxford Latinitas, he has worked in consulting and energy-market analysis, most recently in Tokyo. He is notorious in the Oxford Latinitas team for preferring Homer over Virgil and for being far too keen on all things technological. He also likes Japanese philosophy, opera, and tennis.

Dylan Jones, Our Senior Independent Director, is a graduate of University College Oxford, where he read Modern History.

During his 35 year executive career he led businesses for Coats, Bunzl, Staples, Northgate and KKR, including 18 years living and working in Peru, Japan, Hongkong, Australia and Italy, learning Spanish, Japanese and Italian “in situ”.

More recently Dylan has taken on the role of Chair at several dynamic young companies, including “Devoted” – marketing premium pet foods – and “Stitch & Story”, offering materials and instruction for textile crafts. He is also Vice Chair at HMT, a medical charity with two hospitals, several dementia-specialised care homes, and over 500 employees.

Dylan loves cricket, conversation, and cultural exploration.

Althea R. L. Sovani is currently reading for an MPhil in Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at Somerville College, University of Oxford. In the summer of 2022 she graduated from the University of Oxford with a BA in Classics with Sanskrit. For her final exams in 2022, she was awarded the Craven Prize, the Comparative Philology Prize, the Boden Prize and the Gaisford Undergraduate Essay Prize for her thesis on approaches to suppletion in the ancient Greek and Sanskrit grammatical traditions. In 2020 she also won the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin Prose, and in 2022 the Gaisford Prize for Greek Verse. She comes from Italy, where she first learned Ancient Greek and Latin at the state school G. Berchet in Milan. While at school, she won national translation competitions from Ancient Greek. She is passionate about Indo European philology, grammaticalisation and periphrastic constructions. Nothing delights her more than enquiring into the origin of words and decoding grammatical structures. She loves Pseudo-Longinus, Marcus Aurelius and the Sanskrit philosopher-grammarian Bhartṛhari. Her role models are Pāṇini, Anna Morpurgo Davies and Benedetto Croce. Althea cannot bear the use of the term thing — except in philosophical discourse — and defends all words from maiming abbreviations, adjectives from superlatives, clauses from stylistic impoverishment and synonyms from oblivion.

Dr Iván Parga Ornelas is the Jagger Lecturer in Ancient Greek at Jesus College, Oxford. He holds a PhD in Renaissance Studies from the University of Warwick, where he wrote a thesis on the fifteenth-century Neo-Latin author Maffeo Vegio. Iván also completed an MA in Medieval Studies from the Complutense University of Madrid and a BA in Classics from the Università Salesiana in Rome. He started his studies in Latin and Greek at the Academia Vivarium Novum in 2009. Iván has been involved with Oxford Latinitas since its foundation. He teaches Latin and Greek at all levels and previously held the position of Deputy CEO.

Iván is interested in the enduring history of Latin language and literature beyond antiquity and his research deals mainly with Neo-Latin texts. He has recently been awarded the Society for Neo-Latin Studies Ann Moss Early Career Essay prize for his research in this field. Alongside his professional interest in Latin and Greek literature, Iván enjoys modern literature, mainly in Spanish, English and Italian. His favourite authors are Virgil, T.S Eliot and Jorge Luis Borges, not always in that order. He is also an avid movie watcher and cinemagoer.

Colton Duncan lives in Oxford along with his wife Monica. He is pursuing his DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature and takes interest in both ancient philosophy and modern approaches to its study. He enjoys backpacking, reading, grilling out, and visiting his extended family in his hometown of Clarksville, Ohio (USA).

Colton first encountered the active method after graduating from Hillsdale College with a BA in Classics. While running a summer landscaping business, he met a homeowner who, upon hearing that Colton had studied Classics, began to recite Homer and explain it to him in ancient Greek. For the rest of that summer, Colton had biweekly active method lessons with the homeowner on his front porch in exchange for mowing his lawn. He is passionate for making Latin and Greek texts accessible for students.

Natalia Čepeláková lives in Prague. She graduated with distinction from the Department of Classical Philology at Moscow State University. She has taught Latin, Greek, ancient literature, and its reception at various universities in Moscow, including St. Tikhon’s Orthodox University and the National Research University Higher School of Economics. For ten years, she directed the Summer School for the Study of Antiquity.

Having discovered the direct method of teaching Latin, she became captivated by the potential of the contextual induction approach and the enjoyment and inspiration it brings to both students and teachers. After years of practice, she now specialises in teaching Latin as a living language, using immersion techniques and active spoken practice. She teaches both in person and online, in regular courses and summer schools, and runs the Latin YouTube channel Amica Certa.

She also designs courses devoted to the daily life of Rome and to the lives of Roman women. A special area of her interest is women who spoke and wrote in Latin after antiquity. She loves stories about animals — especially those that do not exist — and about journeys, particularly fantastical ones, and eagerly shares such discoveries with her students.

Krasimir Ivanov comes from Bulgaria, where he studied at the National Classical Lyceum and later graduated in classical philology from Sofia University. For two years he attended the Accademia Vivarium Novum in Rome, where he became fluent in Latin. For the last three years, he has been participating in OL as a tutor, and he is currently teaching Active Latin classes at Jesus College, Oxford. His main interests are related to the Roman Republic, where he is looking for the reasons that ex pulcherruma atque optuma pessuma ac flagitiosissuma facta sit. He also loves agriculture, astronomy, and good tales, and enjoys studying ancient thought – from Homer and Cato to the monks of Mount Athos.

Abi López Ortiz is a linguist and Spanish teacher from Mexico City. With no prior knowledge of the language, she began Latin in 2014 at an immersion course in Italy and since then has learned and taught solely through the active method. She has joined immersion programmes in Rome, Buenos Aires, Santiago and Montella, and participated in numerous online courses, workshops and reading circles. She was a member of In Foro Romano, the first all-women Latin podcast, and has also collaborated with initiatives such as Lupercal and Project Nota. In 2023 she was a guest lecturer at Forte Academy’s Women Latinists course in Florence. Her work has always taken place in community-based learning and teaching contexts, which has allowed her to maintain an open, experimental and collective approach to Latin. Abi enjoys creating her own teaching materials and reflect on language itself, often questioning the authority of canonical models and imagining alternatives that make learning more accessible. Outside of these pursuits, she loves cats, board games, and moonlit bike rides.

Alexander Olave is a Lecturer in Latin and Greek at the University of La Sabana and has previously served as an Adjunct Professor of Classics at the National University of Colombia and as a Lecturer at Unicervantes University in Bogotá. His engagement with the Classics began at the age of 16, eventually leading him to enroll in Colombia’s only Classics program at the National University, where he completed a BA in Spanish and Classical Philology.
In 2022, he earned an MPhil in Classics at the University of Cambridge. His research interests include Greek Imperial literature, embodiment and the body in literature, intertextuality, epistolography, and reception studies. In addition to his work with ancient languages and culture, Alexander also works in academic publishing.
At Oxford Latinitas, he teaches both Latin and Greek. When not in the classroom, he loves travel, hiking, visiting museums, and spending time with his three beautiful cats, Marlowe, Evelina, and Peregrine.

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.

Brian Lapsa is a D.Phil. student in Classics researching the late pagan and early Christian use of exempla for ethical formation. After a BA in History and German at the University of Virginia, he worked in marketing and translation, ultimately returning to academic life to read Philosophy (M.A., M.Phil.) at Leuven and Classics (B.A.) at Oxford. He has taught at the University of Leiden and is currently Assistant Researcher in Roman History at the University of Latvia. In 2018-19 Brian served as President of the Oxford Latinitas Society.

Beth Parker is a student at Brasenose College, University of Oxford. Having studied Latin traditionally for seven years before discovering the Active Method at Oxford, she was quick to recognise the benefits and above all the huge amount of joy to be found in immersing oneself completely in ancient languages, which allows her to engage with ancient texts in a much more profound and enlightening way. Beth is passionate about linguistics, metre and ancient music; she leads music sessions at Oxford Latinitas with her lyre, and enjoys imitating the Ancient Greek method of musical composition. She is most likely to be found marvelling at the unparalleled beauty of Vergil’s Latin hexameters or lost in composing Latin poetry of her own – often simultaneously. In 2024 she received the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin verse composition. Beth is eager to share her love for the ancient world with anyone
and everyone.

Charis Jo (Guenevera) was the founder and first president (2017-18) of the Oxford Latinitas Project, and the director of its first two Septimanae Latinae. She is currently a DPhil candidate in Classics (Language and Literature) at Oriel College writing her doctoral thesis on dialectic in Latin Philosophy, specifically the Augustinian fragment ‘de dialectica.’ She has also taught Latin at Jesus College and is an intern at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, currently working on the word revirescere. Besides academics, she loves classical music, good arguments, running, and reading with friends.

Christian Costa studied Ancient Greek and Latin at the AVN, focusing both on the languages themselves and on the art of teaching them. He later pursued studies in Italian and Latin literature at the University of Pisa and began working towards the DITALS certification for teaching Italian as a foreign language. Passionate about language pedagogy, Christian has embraced the natural method as an effective and engaging approach to teaching.

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.

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.
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.

Jason Webber is a researcher in ancient languages and literature, who became interested in spoken Latin (and subsequently ancient Greek) while studying Greek and Latin literature at Oxford. Jason now has extensive experience in teaching spoken Attic Greek at all levels from beginners to advanced, and is currently developing a new coursebook based on the Active Method.

Jason recently completed a doctoral degree in ancient Greek literature, on the topic of local traditions in early Greek epos, at Magdalen College, Oxford, England, and they are this year working on a new grammar of the Hesiodic poems (Theogony and Works and Days) at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, Germany.

Jerfferson Manoel Araújo da Silva Júnior has loved Latin since childhood. Even though he started his academic journey in library and information science, he quickly changed his mind and decided to pursue Latin, his true passion. After studying Latin and Ancient Greek at the AVN (Rome, Italy), he completed his BA in Spanish Language and Literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN) in Brazil. He also has an MA in Comparative Literature from the same university with a Master’s thesis on Francesco Petrarca’s authorial self-representation and his latent unbelonging. Now, as a doctoral student, his main aim is to continue working with Petrarca’s writings and to provide the first translation from Latin into Portuguese of the poet’s book of letter poems, the Epystole. He is also interested in the Neo-Latin literature concerning Colonial Brazil and the Old Tupi language. He started teaching Latin by the natural method in a language institute at the aforementioned university in 2016, has been teaching Latin online since 2023, and since 2025 he has been a Latin teacher at Oxford Latinitas.

Joanna Thornhill was born and raised in sunny Los Angeles, California. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Liberal Arts at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has a great passion for ancient languages and makes it a priority to understand the speech and mind of the ancients as well as possible. She has taught a variety of students Greek and Latin both in individual and group settings. Apart from studying languages, she spends much of her time reading literary and philosophical texts and discussing them with her friends. Homer and Aristotle are two of her favorite authors to read. She also enjoys hiking and seeing all that nature’s beauty has to offer.

Mark is currently a student at Pembroke College, Oxford, reading for a degree in Arabic and Islamic Studies. Whilst studying Latin and Greek in the National Classical Lyceum in Bulgaria, Mark’s recently kindled passion for ancient languages led him to the Accademia Vivarium Novum, where he learned to experience Latin and Greek at an entirely different level by speaking them, which enabled him to comprehend ancient texts much more profoundly. His current interests involve the development of epic poetry, comparative Semitic linguistics, the reception of the Greco-Roman and the ancient Near Eastern worlds in the Arabo-Islamic cultural milieu and, in the realm of hobbies, playing the guitar. He believes that ancient texts should be studied so that their wisdom be reflected on and applied to solving current problems. Through them, he thinks, we can understand how people of different cultures and philosophical traditions have more in common than might be initially perceived.

Born and educated in Germany, where he first became acquainted with Latin and Greek, Matthias fell in love with the Studia Humanitatis when he attended the Accademia Vivarium Novum in Frascati, Italy. He subsequently returned to Germany to study Latin, Greek, Italian, History, Philosophy and Education at the University of Munich, but discovered he had itchy feet, and so, like a latter-day Grand Tourist, he ‘left his country’s bounds and sweet felds’ to study at the University of Palermo, the University of Exeter and the Sorbonne Université in Paris and continues to seize every opportunity to study and work abroad. In 2023, Matthias graduated in Munich with a dissertation on Dante’s Divina Commedia, his favourite work ever written in the vernacular. Despite his affection for Dante, he is currently reading for his MSt in Latin and Greek languages and literature at the University of Oxford.

Though he loves the elegant Latin style of the Golden Age, and enjoys spamming people with endless emails and messages written in Ciceronian Latin, his greatest pleasure is reading humanist authors – especially Erasmus – to see how they adapted ancient morals to the issues of their time and transmitted the jewels of ancient literature to their pupils. Matthias started teaching Latin at the Summer Courses of the Accademia Vivarium Novum in 2019, taught twice at the Scholae Aestivae Bulgaricae and has been teaching Latin and Greek for Oxford Latinitas since 2022.

Nicholas Romanos is a student of Classics and Sanskrit at Worcester College, University of Oxford. In 2023 he was awarded the highest mark in his year for Classics Mods, and also received the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin prose composition. Besides the literature of the ancients, among whom he naturally reveres Homer most of all, he has a particular interest in philosophy (especially Nietzsche and Wittgenstein) and comparative philology. The active method has led him to a deeper and more intuitive understanding of Latin and Greek texts, and he is delighted to have the opportunity to share this with others.

Oroel Marcuello Gil was born in Zaragoza, Spain. Spending a year in the Academia Vivarium novum (2017-18), he fell in love with classical languages and authors, especially Sophocles and Ovid. Wishing to preserve the humanistic spirit that he enjoyed there, he founded with a colleague a spoken-Latin group in Zaragoza University, with which he also organised two trips to the academy. He has also taught for OLP, especially Greek, he was a tutor in scholae aestivae 2020, and has collaborated with Cultura Clásica.

He loves education, linguistics, rock-climbing, music, and psychology. He plays cello and writes novels and poetry.

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.