Living Latin in New York City

Dr David Butterfield is Provost and Professor of Latin at Ralston College, Savannah, GA. His primary areas of research are Latin literature, textual criticism, and the history of scholarship. He has published books on Lucretius, Varro, A.E. Housman and The Spectator. He is Editor-in-chief of the Classics website Antigone, Literary Editor of The Critic, and is finishing a new Oxford Classical Text of Lucretius.

Ignacio Armella Chávez (Accademia Vivarium novum): Born in Mexico City in 1986, he obtained a degree in classical philology from the Universidad nacional autónoma de México (UNAM) in 2009, with a thesis on The death of Socrates according to Plato. Afterward he obtained his master’s degree in Classics at the Pontificium institutum altioris Latinitatis in Rome with the thesis written in Latin Quid Nicolaus Cusanus et Marsilius Ficinus de concordia senserint. Since 2010, he has taught History of ancient philosophy and Advanced Latin composition at the Accademia Vivarium novum, an institution internationally renowned for its innovative methods for the teaching of classical languages and its endeavor of renewal of classical education. As vice-president of the same institution, he contributes assiduously to its academic, cultural and publishing activities, and has participated in several international conferences and courses, both as an organizer and as a speaker, in countries like Belgium, Colombia, China, France, Georgia, Greece, India, Italy, Nepal, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Taiwan. He is an ordinary member of the Academia Latinitati fovendae, and a founding member of the Centro studi sull’uomo, la natura e l’unità del pensiero, an organization founded to fill the gap that divides humanistic and scientific education. Among his publications, there is a number of articles and contributions in different languages (including Latin), as well as the following books: Coincidentia oppositorum (2013), Quod eritque fuitque: giochi di specchi fra l’accaduto e l’avvenire (2022); Memoriae sacrum : in memoriam Iohannis Pugliese Carratelli (editor, 2023).

Isabel Schumacher is an undergraduate student at Brandeis University majoring in both Linguistics and Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies. At Brandeis she is an undergraduate department representative and has led numerous social and educational activities to increase campus awareness of the classics department. She has previously presented on ethnic and civic terminology in Plautus’ Poenulus at the University of Georgia’s undergraduate conference.

Will has a wide array of interests, but a deliberately narrow regimen of teaching, namely all Latin, all the time (except for the occasional Greek class). After earning a B. A. in Classics from the University of Virginia (2009), with a semester at the Centro along the way (Fall 2007), Will earned two M. A.'s at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary (2015), then began to teach Latin in Peabody, MA. While he enjoyed his colleagues and students, Will felt that he was a mediocre teacher at best, and began a journey to improve his craft by examining the tradition of Latin learning and teaching over the past 2000 years, as well as research on how second languages are acquired. Both of these currents beckoned him to the shore of speaking lots of Latin in the classroom and helping students read Latin literature fluidly and feel its force in their bones. He is continually striving to progress in his teaching, and is always excited to read, elucidate, and discuss Latin literature in Latin with others. He has been teaching at the Veritas School in Richmond for the past 9 years, and is currently interested in the science of memory, the history of notebooks, mixing cocktails, and accumulating houseplants.

Carl Hamilton received his MA from the University of Virginia and BA from Dickinson College, both in Classics, and is a frequent participant of Latin colloquia and courses. He hopes that the increased use of Latin as a living language will foster an appreciation of authors and works from all periods of Latinity. 

Bill Linney played the saxophone in the United States Army Band "Pershing's Own" for 20 years. After retiring from the army in 2019, he earned a masters degree in Classics from the University of Maryland. He is now working on a Ph.D. in the department of Greek and Latin at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. His interests include Bronze Age writing systems, Semitics, the Ancient Near East, archaeology, and publishing. He is the author of the book Getting Started with Latin.

Dr. Patrick M. Owens teaches in the Department of Classics at Colgate University and has partnered with the Paideia Institute for the Humanities since its inception. He also serves as the president of the American Association for Neo-Latin Studies, and editor of the Neo-Latin Lexicon. Patrick and his co-author Paul Gwynne recently published a volume titled Lorenzo Gambara's Caprarola and On Poetic Composition, from Brill (2025), which focuses on the works of Renaissance poet Lorenzo Gambara and Jesuit humanist Antonio Possevino.  When Patrick is not on the Colgate campus, he is most often in Kansas City, where he has taught literature in the Kansas State Maximum Security Penitentiary. He holds a Bachelors from Fordham University, a Masters from the University of Kentucky, and a PhD from the Pontificium Institutum Altioris Latinitatis (Rome).

Terence Tunberg completed his doctoral studies in the Department of Classics and the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1986. He began to devote himself to spoken Latin as a graduate student and has since then regularly taken part in seminars for spoken Latin in Europe and North America. In 1998 he was elected fellow of the Academia Latinitati Fovendae, the Rome-based international organization for maintaining the use of Latin. He has moderated the Conventiculum Aestivum, an annual immersion seminar in spoken Latin, for nearly three decades. Together with Milena Minkova he teaches in the Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis at the University of Kentucky, a two-year post-graduate curriculum in which Latin literature and Latin composition are taught entirely in Latin. This curriculum has been
available online since 2020. Terence has published extensively on prose style in classical and Neo-Latin, and has won international prizes for Latin composition. Together with Milena Minkova he has written several works, including a manual of Latin prose composition, and, most recently Recentiores, non deteriores, which is about to be published by Peeters Publishers of Leuven, Belgium. Recentiores, non deteriores deals with Neo-Latin prose language and style, and indicates how the word-choice, rhetorical strategies and sentence structures employed by some outstanding early-modern Latin authors can be highly useful for people interested in writing and speaking Latin today.

Milena Minkova is Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky. She has published on Latin literature in its continuity, 12th century Renaissance, Latin Composition, Latin Pedagogy, and Active Latin. Together with Terence Tunberg, Minkova has co-authored the introductory Latin series “Latin for the New Millennium.” Both Minkova and Tunberg moderate the Institute for Latin Studies, a Graduate Certificate Curriculum associated with the M.A. Program in Classics at the University of Kentucky, in which Latin is taught in its continuity from ancient until modern times and in the target language (since 2020 the Certificate has been offered online as well). Minkova’s critical anthology of Neo Latin Florilegium recentioris Latinitatis came out from Leuven University Press in 2018. Minkova’s new volume, co-authored with Terence Tunberg, Recentiores, non deteriores is about to be published by Peeters Publishers—it deals with Neo-Latin prose style and ways in which it can impact our approach to Latin today.

After a decade of service to Benedict XVI and Francis as a papal Latinist, Daniel Gallagher was named the Ralph and Jeanne Kanders Professor of the Practice in Latin at Cornell University. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the Catholic University of America, and the Pontifical Gregorian University, and has published extensively in medieval philosophy, especially in the areas of metaphysics and aesthetics. He is passionate about handing on the Latin language based on the principles and method of his long-time mentor, Fr. Reginald Foster. Professor Gallagher currently lives with his family in Savannah, where he teaches literature and philosophy at Ralston College.

Ian Flanders (MTS: Holy Cross,  BA: Catholic University) is an expert in Byzantine chant and a lover of Greek language and literature. A man of many interests varied and sundry, his primary research has focused on Late Antique Greek philosophy and science, considering especially its relationship with the development of Christian doctrine. A fervent admirer of Texas Longhorn Cattle and everything agricultural and farm-related, Cato the Elder holds a special place in his heart as the one who inspired him to incorporate large quantities of sauerkraut and beer into his diet.

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.

John James is a PhD student in Classics at SUNY, Buffalo. He received his BA in Classical Studies from Hillsdale College and his MA in Ancient Philology from the Polis Institute in Jerusalem. At Polis he also taught immersive Ancient Greek courses ranging from absolute beginner to advanced reading and composition courses based on the ancient progymnasmata. His MA thesis “The Greek and Hebrew Background of σπλάγχνα in the New Testament” explored the Greek bodily and emotional metaphors connected to the Greek word σπλάγχνα from Homer to early Christianity. John’s current research focuses on Ancient Greek grammarians and rhetoricians, poetics, scholia, and ancient music. John is also the graduate Fellow of the Tesserae Project, a digital humanities project that identifies allusions between ancient authors. When not reading Ancient Greek, John likes to run, watch birds, and play the cello.

Nissa Maria Flanders is a doctoral student in Greek & Latin at the Catholic University of America, where she teaches and tutors both Greek and Latin. Over the past several years, she has enjoyed taking part in a spoken Greek & Latin group at CUA, which she currently co-organises with William Linney; she has also attended Homer Camp and Plato Camp (Ancient Language Institute), Σύνοδος ἑλληνική (Polis Institute), and, of course, LLiNYC. Her research focuses primarily on reception and character development in the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. 

Roberto Salazar is an experienced polyglot language coach and nomadic classicist, with a passion for teaching Latin and Greek as spoken languages, and an impossible desire to speak all tongues imaginable, and to teach them to those who want to learn them.

He has taught Latin, Greek, Arabic, German and more in different places around the world, including various Paideia programs, online and on site. A former fellow of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, where he studied Classics and Philosophy, he's currently writing a PhD dissertation on the reception of Greek tragedy in the Arab World, Modern Greece and Latin America. He has also done research on European Classical Reception and Neo-Latin.

He has published fiction translations into French and Spanish from various languages including Swedish. In 2017, he was the head literary curator for the French-Colombian Year.

That's probably why he's still scrambling to complete his PhD at the University of Versailles.

He currently lives between Athens, Cairo and Saint Denis, France.

Linguist Christophe Rico has a doctorate in ancient Greek and holds the French official accreditation to direct PhD research. Member of the Faculty of the University of Strasbourg, he is Professor of Greek Philology at the Ecole Biblique of Jerusalem. Since 2011, he is the Dean of the Polis Institute at Jerusalem where ancient languages (Greek, Latin, biblical Hebrew, Syriac, Coptic, classical Arabic) are taught through full immersion as living languages according to the “Polis method”. 

Giorgi Barnabishvili is an M.A. student in Ancient Languages and Civilisations at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University. He serves as Head of the Student Club at the Institute of Classical, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. In addition, he teaches Classical Civilisations, as well as World and Georgian History, at the European School (ASAS – American School of Advanced Studies). His research focuses on Xenophon’s Anabasis and Cyropaedia, examining their ethnical conceptualisations and the interplay between Xenophon’s works, other Greek historiographical perspectives, and Eastern sources.

James Karlin earned his BA in Classics from Kenyon College, with intensive coursework in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit, and his MA in Eastern Classics from St. John’s College, where he studied the great books of India, China, and Japan, along with Classical Chinese. While his deepest academic passion lies in ancient texts and archeology, he practices the liberal arts pedagogical ideal of cultivating wonder and excellence across many disciplines, and has taught sixth through twelfth grade language, literature, history, arts, and science classes at classical charter schools and Jewish day schools for nearly a decade. Mr. Karlin currently leads Emet Classical Academy’s Classical Languages department.

Will Knispel is a junior at Ridgefield High School in Ridgefield, Connecticut. He is currently enrolled in Latin IV Honors as part of the University of Connecticut’s Early College Experience (ECE). This past summer, he participated in the Paideia Institute’s Living Latin in Rome High School program. Prior to high school, Will began learning Latin in his spare time with his older siblings. Over the past two years, he has earned maxima cum laude and summa cum laude distinctions on the National Latin Exam.

Will is the founder, on-site coordinator, and sole teacher for Connecticut’s first and only location of the Paideia Institute’s Teaching Literacy with Latin program. He is now in his second year of volunteering at the Danbury Grassroots Academy in Danbury, Connecticut, where he teaches Latin language and culture to selected at-risk students. Last year, Will taught seventh-grade students, and this year he has expanded the program to include both seventh and eighth-grade students. He prides himself on teaching Latin in an accessible, engaging way through interactive lessons and hands-on activities.

As a certified Emergency Medical Responder and aspiring physician, Will particularly enjoys studying the intersection of medicine, health, and the Roman Empire.

Robert Conn received his M.A. in Classical Archaeology from Florida State University and his Ph.D in Classical Civilizations from the University of Florida. As a founding faculty member of Thaden School in Bentonville, AR, and the inaugural chair of the World Languages department, he cultivated a curriculum that has emphasized spoken Latin since the school’s inception in 2017. He is dedicated to integrating archaeology into his teaching, co-developing innovative courses such as The Culinary and Cultural Roots of Western Civilization. His interdisciplinary courses and projects bridge language, history, and archaeology, and he fosters engagement through student-centered activities, including games and a spoken Latin lunch, which is the focus of his talk this year.