Tony M. Vinci lives at the crossroads of popular culture and literary history. He teaches classes on HBO’s Game of Thrones and Holocaust literature, fantasy in young adult literature and literary modernisms, androids in film and African American literature. His scholarship is as diverse as his classes, including publications on ghosts, animals, and African American identities in the literature of William Faulkner; trauma in the science fiction of Philip K. Dick; and the ethical confrontation explored by contemporary filmmakers such as Joss Whedon and Guillermo del Toro.

Dr. Neil W. Bernstein conducts research on the representation of family and community in ancient Roman literature.

“I study the aristocratic Roman family and the multiple ways that it is represented in different genres of Roman literature,” he says. “I complement my research on the biological family with study of non-biological relationships which the Romans represented as familial. I examine adoption fostering, substance-based definitions of kinship, and mentoring relationships.”