CAMS welcomes new faculty for 2025/26!

The Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies is excited to be welcoming two new faculty members in 2025/26.

Prof. Joshua Roberson is Visiting Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State. He received his Ph.D. in Egyptology, specializing in Egyptian language, from the University of Pennsylvania in 2007. He serves currently as tenured Associate Professor of Art History and Egyptian Language at the University of Memphis and as Assistant Director of the Institute of Egyptian Art & Archaeology. He has worked extensively at sites throughout Egypt, including Saqqara and Abydos, with the University of Pennsylvania; Karnak temple, with the French Nation Center for Scientific Research; Elephantine island, with the German Archaeological Institute; as well as the Valley of the Kings and the private necropolis of El-Asasif, while on fellowship with the American Research Center in Egypt. He has conducted museum research at the University of Pennsylvania, the Cairo Museum, and the British Museum. Dr. Roberson is an internationally recognized expert in multiple disciplines within Egyptology, with an extensive publication history on ancient Egyptian religion and cosmology, cryptography, language, and literature, including more than fifty scholarly articles and other short works, as well as six books, including the The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Earth (2012); The Awakening of Osiris and the Transit of the Solar Barques (2013); Ramesside Inscriptions: Historical and Biographical, vol. IX (2018); A Lexicon of Ancient Egyptian Cryptography of the New Kingdom (2020); Ancient Egypt, New Technology, co-edited with Rita Lucarelli from UC Berkeley and Steve Vinson from Indiana University (2023); and most recently, a new Teaching Grammar of Middle Egyptian (2025). A longer publication list is available at Prof. Roberson's faculty page.

Prof. Katherine Krauss is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies. Prof. Krauss studies Latin didactic and moralizing texts. She is currently completing her first monograph, Exemplarity and Allusion in Macrobius’ Saturnalia (forthcoming with Oxford University Press), and she is beginning work on a second monograph project, which will look at the development of social and political criticism in Latin dialogues from the Late Republic to Late Antiquity. Alongside her work on didactic and dialogue, she maintains active interests in Latin literary production in North Africa. At Penn State, she is excited to teach courses which will explore the interactions between Greco-Roman and other ancient Mediterranean cultures, and which will introduce students to post-classical and late antique literary texts. Check out Prof. Krauss' publications at her faculty page.