Stephanie (Steph) Polos is a fourth-year PhD candidate in Mediterranean Art and Archaeology. Her dissertation, “At Death’s Door: Grave Stelai as Votive Thresholds in Classical Greece,” explores the use and iconography of fifth- and fourth-century BCE funerary monuments as representations of liminal spaces between life and afterlife, and intersections between material culture, mortuary practice, text, image, liminality, and ideas of the afterlife and Underworld in antiquity.
Steph received a BA in History from Humboldt State University in 2015, and an MA in Classics from San Francisco State University in 2019 (thesis: “Dionysian or Anacreontic: Ethnic and Gender Ambiguity on the Anacreontic Vases”). She is currently the Bert Hodge Hill fellow in the American School of Classical Studies in Athens’ (ASCSA) regular program for the 2023-24 academic year. In previous years she has taken part in the ASCSA summer session (2016) and summer seminar “Thanatopsis” (2022), and excavations in Pompeii (Via Consolare Project, 2018), Athens (Agora Excavations, 2019, 2022), and Israel (Caesarea Coastal Archaeological Project, 2023).
Photo by Craig Mauzy, Agora Excavations (2022)