Institute Staff

Jason Pedicone

Jason Pedicone, the co-founder and President of the Paideia Institute, received his Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton University in 2013. Jason has taught courses in Latin, Greek, and the history of Classical Scholarship at the university level in the U.S. and Western Europe, and is an adjunct professor at Brooklyn College and Fordham University. Jason’s research and public speaking focus on public humanities and Latin and Greek pedagogy. Jason received a Fulbright Fellowship for research in Germany in 2004, and a Jacob Javits Fellowship in 2013 to support his graduate work.  In 2015, together with Paideia's co-founder, Eric Hewett, Jason was awarded the President’s Award by the Society for Classical Studies for outstanding achievements in promoting the study of Classics. He lives in Manhattan.

Eugene Cunningham

Gene is one of Paideia's Classical Tour Managers. He received his B.A. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley in May of 2013. He participated in Living Latin in Rome in 2013 and Living Greek in Greece in 2012 and 2013, and Living Latin in Paris in 2013. He was Paideia's Rome Fellow for 2013-2014. He lived in Germany as a visiting student in 2014-2015 and is currently a student at the Sapienza University of Rome.

Joseph Conlon

Joseph Conlon has a BA from Reed College and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has taught in various Paideia programs since 2011, including LGiG, LLiR, and LLiR(HS), and also teaches Sanskrit through Telepaideia. He currently holds a postdoctoral fellowship with Paideia and is creating digital resources for learning Latin and Ancient Greek, including a Latin high school textbook. He is interested in language pedagogy, theories of language acquisition, historical linguistics, Homer, Plato, and Plautus.

Ilias Kolokouris

Jonathan Meyer

Jonathan Meyer holds a B.A. from Calvin College and an M.A. from Yale University. He also participated in the active Latin program at the University of Kentucky, where he earned an additional M.A. His interests in the ancient world and the classical tradition extend broadly, but he is primarily focused on Latin literature of the Renaissance and early modern period. He spent a year at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece, studying the Latin travel diaries of Cyriac of Ancona. He also worked on neo-Latin novels written in the Habsburg empire as a fellow at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck, Austria. He is currently a Ph.D. student in Classics at Johns Hopkins University.

Marco Romani Mistretta

Before joining the Paideia Institute, Marco Romani Mistretta received a PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard University. At Paideia, his main duties include managing Aequora and the Legion Project, developing curricular materials, and co-supervising the Institute’s Summer Humanities Internship. As a classicist, he has taught a number of courses on ancient languages, literature, and philosophy. He has also published research articles on science and technology in the ancient world, as well as on the history of Classical scholarship in modern Europe.

Clare Nash

Clare graduated in 2018 from Grinnell College, where she studied Classics and Linguistics. Her most substantial research in undergrad was on representations of violence against non-Roman women on the Column of Marcus Aurelius. Clare is a recent alumna of both Living Latin in Rome (2018) and Living Greek in Greece (2018). 

Eric Simpson

Eric, Paideia's Chief Development Officer, received his B.A. in Classics from Yale College in 2011, and is now a Fellow of his residential college, Saybrook. He joined the Paideia Institute in 2018 after five years as an editor at The New Criterion. A violinist since age four, he has contributed reviews and articles on classical music to The Wall Street Journal, The Classical Review, The New Criterion, and The Hopkins Review. 

Henrietta Hakes

Henrietta worked as a assistant curator at the Musée d'Art Classique de Mougins in the south of France and in the finance world in the United States. She received a BA in Ancient Greek from Swarthmore College and a M.St. in Classical Archaeology from Oxford. Her interests include the reception of the Classical world in Renaissance art and representations of Greek drama in vase painting. She also collects rare books on the interaction between text and image in ancient art and is a member of the Grolier Club.

David Hewett

David Hewett manages outreach for Paideia's Classical Tours in Europe and the US, and also teaches for Telepaideia. He has an M.A. in Classics from the University of Virginia and is writing a dissertation on Seneca's Epistulae Morales for the same institution. He has been a Regular Member of the American School for Classical Studies at Athens, a student at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, and holds a B.A. in Classical Studies from Dickinson College. In addition to this formal education, he studied with Reginald Foster in Rome for two summers, has attended numerous Conventicula, and has lived and traveled extensively in Germany, Turkey, and Egypt. He currently lives in Washington, D.C.

Jamel Daugherty

After almost a decade of teaching languages, Jamel left the classroom to focus on writing curriculum. After teaching 5th grade Latin at Washington Latin Public Charter School, she developed materials for the Aequora program, served as a subject matter expert for the Institute's Summer Humanities Internship in 2017, and joined as a full time curriculum designer for 2018. She holds degrees in Classics and Letters from the University of Oklahoma and is pursuing a M.A. in Educational Technology Leadership from George Washington University. Outside classics and linguistics, Jamel is particularly interested in Irish archaeology and literature. She lives near Washington, DC with her husband, young son, and feisty calico.

Mitchell Towne

Mitchell is an alumnus of Paideia’s Living Greek in Greece and Living Latin in Paris programs. He was a Rome Fellow 2016-2017 after receiving his B.A. in Classics from Williams College. His dream is to one day become a high school teacher. He also enjoys swimming.

Allegra Forbes

Allegra is a former Development and Outreach intern (2017) and an alumna of the Living Greek in Greece program (2015). She has worked as a teaching assistant in Italian, Ancient Greek, and Art History classes at a study abroad program in Viterbo, Italy, and taught her own extracurricular Italian class at St. Mark’s School in Massachusetts. Allegra is currently a student at Barnard College and works at the Paideia Institute’s Brooklyn office on outreach projects such as the Aequora textbooks. 

Eric Hewett

Eric Hewett, co-founder and Executive Director of the Paideia Institute, graduated from Rice University in 1996 with a B.A. in Linguistics, with a focus on historical linguistics, Ancient Greek and Sanskrit.  He then attended the University of Pennsylvania Post-Bachelor in Classics.  He spent the next seven years living and traveling in Western Europe, working as a teacher, tour guide, and translator.  He speaks French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Basque and is a published translator of Basque poetry. In 2004 Eric moved to Rome, where he has earned an M.A. in Patristic Sciences from the Augustinianum Pontifical Institute of the Lateran University and a joint Ph.D. in Medieval Philosophy from the University of Salerno and Patristic Sciences from the Augustinianum. Eric serves as the Institute's Executive Director and Treasurer.