Glenn Maur

Graduate Student

E-mail: gmaur@g.ucla.edu

Before arriving at UCLA, Glenn received bachelor’s degrees in Classics and French, a master’s degree in Classics and Digital Humanities, and attended intensive summer language programs at Harvard and Beth Mardutho. His dissertation, Reconstructing Antiquity: A Cognitive Approach to Biographical Writing in Scribal and Literary Cultures, deals with the reception of Greco-Roman biography in Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, augmenting traditional philological analysis with cognitive studies in conceptual and analogical thought, the neuroscience of memory, and associative learning. Glenn is involved in collaborations with cognitive science labs and researchers at multiple universities, participating in the design and implementation of experimental research and fostering innovative transdisciplinary dialogues and partnerships between STEM and the Humanities in Classics and Medieval Studies. Glenn has also collaborated with the team of scholars working on the Sinai Manuscripts Digital Library Project, contributing to the cataloging of the Greek and Arabic manuscript collection preserved at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Mount Sinai, Egypt. As an extension of his work on scribal culture and the art of manuscript illustration, Glenn also teaches a course on international comics, the most comprehensive global overview of the medium currently offered at any US institution, titled Comics, Manga, and Bande Dessineée. Ongoing publishing projects include co-editing an anthology, The Medieval Cleopatra Reader, for which he is translating excerpts from over seventy-five medieval texts originally written in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and Syriac as well as co-editing a book on the reception of Batman in global media, contributing his own articles on regional adaptations of the character in Arabic and Indonesian language comics.

Education

Ph.D., UCLA, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures
Summer Intensive Intermediate-Advanced Syriac, Beth Mardutho
M.A., Tufts University, Classics and Digital Humanities
Summer Language Program in Classical Arabic, Harvard Divinity School
B.A., Arizona State University, Classics
B.A., Arizona State University, French

Publications

The Medieval Cleopatra Reader, contributing co-editor (in preparation)
“Scribal Culture” in The Oxford Handbook to the Literatures of the Roman Empire (Oxford) (in preparation)
Batman International: Essays on Global Comics History, contributing co-editor (in preparation)
“Alexander Romance” in Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān Online(Brill) (2022)
“Qiṣṣat Dhī al-Qarnayn” in The Database of Religious History(University of British Columbia) (2022)
“Julian Romance” in The Database of Religious History(University of British Columbia) (2022)
“From the End to the Beginning: Socrates as Iconoclast in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa and the Contestation of his Biography in Greek and Arabic Sources.” Viator3 (2019)
Greek Dependency Treebank Commentary of the Life of Aesopwith J. Matthew Harrington, Ph.D. (The Perseids Project) (2019)

Conference Presentations

“Translation and Cognition: Alexander the Great from Scribal Hand to Internet Meme,” Medieval Academy of America (2024)
“Emperor Julian as Guardian of Ancient Philosophical Thought in the Fihrist of Ibn al-Nadīm,” Texas Medieval Association Conference (2021)
“That Which Does Not Speak, That Which Does Not Hear: Socrates as Iconoclast in Ibn Abī Uṣaybiʿa,” International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University (2019)
“Reading the Life of Aesop as Slave Narrative: Object Bodies, Literacy, and Resistance in the Ancient Novel,” Brandeis University Classics Graduate Conference (2018)
“The Enfreakment of Thersites: The Deformed Body as Spectacle in Homer’s Iliad,” University of Virginia Classics Graduate Colloquium (2018)
“The Road to Babylon: Interpreting the Ethnology of India in the Greek Texts of the Alexander Romance,” North-West Undergraduate Conference on the Ancient World (2016)
“Priest, Paradise, and Prophecy: A European Perspective on an Episode of the Alexander Romance,” Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference (2016)

Languages

Ancient Greek
Classical Arabic
Latin
Syriac
Indonesian
French
German