Charles Ham earned a B.A. in Classical Languages from Grand Valley State University in 2006 and entered the Penn Ph.D. program in 2007.

His main interests center upon the question of literature's relationship to its non-literary context. He is interested especially in the epistemological value of literature in the ancient world and in how ancient assessments of this value formed and changed through time. This interest has led Charles to the study of didactic poetry, and, in particular, Latin didactic, with the aim of examining the tension between its generic and social constituents. He continues more and more, however, to be drawn to examining such questions in genres of poetry that make no explicit claims about knowledge. One of the more interesting phenomena to him in literary history is the growing sphere of "imaginative" literature. Works, both ancient and modern, that began as philosophical or historical have slid into this category, but the shifting is unidirectional, that is, one rarely sees "poetic" works later considered as anything else. He intends to examine possible sources for this in ancient conceptions of genre and the epistemological value of literature.