The entire event will take place at the Levis Faculty Center in Room 208 on Monday, December 8, 2025.
1:00-1:30: Set up and meet and greet
1:30-1:35: Opening remarks
Daniel W. Leon
Associate Professor of Classics
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
1:35-2:35: Panel 1: The Experience of War
Margarita Pyrgali – Samos, Sparta, and Political Opportunism: A Comparative Reading of Motives in Herodotus
Houston Boyd – Diekplous and Periplous: Ideas and Confusions
Maria Moulita – Milesian Refugees: Internal Displacement and Diaspora In Leros
2:35-2:45: Coffee break
2:45-3:45: Panel 2: War and Narrative
Amelia Lamis – How to Tell a Funny Story about Deportation: The Comic-Violent Anecdote in Herodotus Book V
Kyle Rutherford – Cyrus’s Shadow: Persian Identity and its Perception in Late Antiquity
Alexander Maltby – Tattoos, Persia, and Greece
3:45-3:55: Coffee break
3:55-4:55: Panel 3: Divine Signs
Katia Markaki – Visions of Empire: Dream, Ritual, and the Psychology of Power in Herodotus’ Xerxes Episode
Laurence Pavlik – Apollo, Builder of Cities
Elana Sanders-Braxton – Exploring Cleomenes’ Impiety in the Persian Wars
4:55-5:00: Closing remarks