Contact Information
707 S Mathews Ave
Urbana, IL 61801
Biography
Clara Bosak-Schroeder (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary creative writer, literary critic, and cultural historian. Clara joined the Classics department of Illinois in 2015 where she is also an affiliate of History, Medieval Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.
Since joining Illinois, Clara has won a Faculty Fellowship from the Humanities Research Institute (2017-2018), a Junior Fellowship from the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory (2018-2020), a LEAP Scholar Award (2018-2020), a Junior Fellowship from the Illinois Center for Advanced Study (2021-2022), a COVID-19 Revitalization Fellowship (2025-2026) and a General Education Innovation Award (2025-2026).
Clara’s first book, Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography (2020) considers how Greek writers represented the relationship between humans and other species. My Own Specimen, in progress, considers similar questions through a collection of personal essays: how do we make sense of embodied experiences like kinship, grief, gender, and reproduction? Do appeals to what is “natural” constrain or liberate us?
Other current projects include articles on graduate pedagogy, the history of the University of Illinois, metaphors of disability in classical scholarship, and how classical studies has been used to shape Black American authorship.
Clara has curated exhibits at the Krannert Art Museum and the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures. They founded and continue to advise CripAntiquity, an advocacy organization for neurodivergent and disabled people in ancient studies.
Research Interests
classical reception studies; creative nonfiction; museum practice; classics and the environmental humanities; Greek and Roman historiography and technical literature; feminist science studies and new materialisms
Additional Campus Affiliations
Associate Professor, Classics
Associate Professor, History
Associate Professor, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory
External Links
Recent Publications
Bosak-Schroeder, C. (2022). CATEGORIES IN JEOPARDY: ARGINUSAE IN ARISTOPHANES' FROGS. Ramus, 51(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/10.1017/rmu.2022.1
Bosak-Schroeder, C. (2020). Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography. University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvxhrhpq
Bosak-sChroeder, C. (2019). Making specimens in the periplus of Hanno and its imperial tradition. American Journal of Philology, 140(1), 67-100. https://doi.org/10.1353/ajp.2019.0003
Bosak-Schroeder, C., & Verhoogt, A. (2018). THUCYDIDES, HISTORIAE 2.62.5-63.2 (P.MICH. INV. 5413 (A) FRONT; TM NO. 131625). Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists, 55, 7-12. https://doi.org/10.2143/BASP.55.0.3285007
Bosak-Schroeder, C. R. M. (2017). Fabricated Elephants and Confused Horses: How Smell Constructs Non/humanity. Paper presented at 148th meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, Toronto, Canada.