Hello, there! Welcome to Ideas Are Food. We are a group of three Classics PhD students at the University of Edinburgh: Angeliki, Inês, and Roberta. This group was born out of a shared interest in cognitive approaches to classical studies and the humanities in general. We decided to set up a reading group based in Edinburgh, but open to anyone who wants to join in, because we believe that understanding is also a process of sharing and confronting opinions. We would also like to thank Prof Douglas Cairns for his guidance and advice in all matters cognitive.
People
Angeliki Pesmatzoglou studied Greek Philology (specialisation: Classical Philology) at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, including an Erasmus semester at the Free University of Berlin. She then completed an MA in ancient Greek at the University of Vienna, and is currently doing a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. Her PhD research aims to explore the emotional dimensions of Iliadic politics both human and divine: by combining methodological tools of classical studies, political sociology, and psychology, her project sets out to investigate the interface between political issues, social values, and emotional responses.
Inês Silva is a Portuguese Classics PhD student at the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Her main focus is Archilochus, the 7th-century BC Greek poet, and she uses a cognitive approach to analyse conceptual frameworks in the fragments of his corpus and in the contexts of transmission of the fragments. She is interested in exploring the relationship between language and thought, namely as culturally-specific expressions of human cognition. Her main research goal is to understand modes of thinking: how the language of the fragments and their posthumous use convey different but interrelated conceptual attitudes that are still intelligible to us today.
Roberta Leotta is an Italian Classics PhD student at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh. Her project focuses on cognitive metaphors of rivalry in the culture of ancient Rome and explores how this human, cross-cultural phenomenon is conceptualised through a metaphorical mapping. She studied Anthropology of the Ancient World at the University of Siena and has always been interested in carrying out comparative and interdisciplinary analysis within Classics. Currently, her main interest is to look into the relationship between cognitive metaphor and emotions and social interactions. Her main aim, then, is to contribute to understanding how metaphors can be informative of some aspects of both the culture of ancient Rome and our own.
Ideas Are Food 