Jordan Johansen is a Teaching Fellow in the Humanities with appointments in the Department of Classics, the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, and the College. She is a scholar and teacher of ancient Mediterranean history, culture, and literature with a focus on Greco-Roman Egypt, gender and sexuality, environmental history, cross-cultural interactions, papyrology, and classical reception in the modern world. At UChicago, she has taught as the instructor of record elementary and intermediate courses in ancient Greek and Latin, courses on Greek and Roman civilization, and a prize lectureship on the life and afterlife of Cleopatra. In 2022-2023, she is teaching in the Gender and Sexuality in World Civilizations core sequence (Fall 2022), Intermediate Greek: Tragedy (Winter 2023), and Monstrous Women in Antiquity (Winter 2023).
Her current book project Flooding Borders: Imagined Spaces between Egypt and Nubia in the Greco-Roman Period draws on a diverse range of evidence from ancient Greek fiction to Egyptian inscriptions to Latin prose to re/de/construct the multiplicity of borders accumulated in the physical and imaginary spaces between Egypt and Nubia in the Greco-Roman period. In addition, her current research projects include epistolary letters in the Greek Magical Papyri, two ancient Greek documentary papyri from the University of Michigan collection, classical reception in 20th century literature written by African American women (Gwendolyn Brooks and Pauline Hopkins), and an ecocritical analysis of the Kandake episode (3.18-24) of The Alexander Romance.
Jordan graduated from the University of Chicago in August 2022 with a PhD in the Program in the Ancient Mediterranean World from the Department of Classics. During her time at UChicago, she was active in institutional service as the co-chair on the provost’s Committee on Graduate Education, VP for Finance of Graduate Council, Classics representative to the Humanities Dean’s Student Advisory Board, Classics department social chair, and the coordinator for the Ancient Societies Workshop. Prior to her time at UChicago, she studied classical languages at the University of Vermont and the University of Dallas and was a Fulbright student in Cyprus. She is an alum of Southern Methodist University, where she graduated summa cum laude and ΦΒΚ with majors in history (honors), anthropology (honors), and music with a minor in human rights.