Joseph Bringman received his PhD in Classics from the University of Washington in 2024 after completing his dissertation on the portrayal of Roman revolutionaries in ancient historiography. He researches how ancient historians depicted political figures and what divergent interpretations of the same figure or event reveal about the authors and the perspectives from which they were writing. Joseph is also interested in how the Romans conceptualized libertas, examining freedom not only in the political context of the Roman government but also in its social, philosophical, and literary conceptions. His research interests also extend to Homeric poetry, and he particularly enjoys the ways in which the oral poets were able to imagine counterfactual possibilities in their narratives so as to express their creativity outside the bounds of their oral tradition while nevertheless refraining from actually violating tradition.
