Sandra BlakelyChair and Associate Professor of Classics

Anthropology, history, religion, fragmentary sources and secret rites are central to Dr. Blakely's research. She completed a PhD in Classics and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, exploring the Greek metallurgical daimones in light of comparative models for the sacralization of metallurgical production from Tanzania and the Bakongo.

She has worked extensively on the most fragmentary sources from the Greek and Roman historians, publishing commentaries on the Augustan mythographer Conon, the late Republican Ethnographer Alexander Polyhistor, and Herodorus of Herakleia, a local historian from a Greek colony on the Black Sea.

Her current research brings Social Network Analysis and Geographic Information Systems to the epigraphic record of the Great Gods of Samothrace, to test the hypothesis that the safety at sea the Samothracian rites promised was asocial reality as well as a mythic metaphor.