Stephanie (Steph) Polos is a fifth-year PhD candidate studying under Tyler Jo Smith. Her dissertation, “At Death’s Door: Grave Stelai as Votive Thresholds in Classical Greece,” explores the role of funerary monuments as a permeable boundary between the living and the dead, exploring the intersections between material culture, mortuary practice, text, image, liminality, and ideas of the afterlife and Underworld in Greek antiquity. She is currently the Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA, 2024-25).

Steph received a BA in History from Humboldt State University (2015) and an MA in Classics from San Francisco State University (2019; “Dionysian or Anacreontic: Ethnic and Gender Ambiguity on the Anacreontic Vases”). In previous years, she has been a ASCSA member in the summer session (2016), “Thanatopsis” summer seminar (2022), and most recently was the Bert Hodge Hill Fellow for the 2023-24 Regular Program. She has also taken part in excavations in Pompeii (Via Consolare Project, 2018), Athens (Agora Excavations, 2019, 2022), Israel (Caesarea Coastal Archaeological Project, 2023), and Corinth (Corinth Excavations/Archaeological Museum, 2024).