Cianna Jackson

Cianna completed her BA (summa cum laude, PBK) at Stony Brook University in European Studies and Art History with a minor in Anthropology in 2019.  Her senior honors project, “Weaving, Women, and Wiles: A Comparison of Two Aristophanic Plays,” which compares the Clouds and Lysistrata, focuses on Aristophanes’ characterization of the ideal Athenian woman based on weaving as a craft and as a form of female speech.  Cianna stayed at Stony Brook for a fifth year to complete her MA (with distinction) in an accelerated program in Art History and completed a thesis entitled “Ritual Irony and the Maiden: The Marriage-Sacrifice Metaphor in Classical Greek Vase Painting.”  Her thesis compares Classical Greek vase paintings and tragic poetry, arguing that marriage imagery subtly suggests virgin sacrifice in gestures which follow the tragic symbolic system of sacrifice.  She completed her MA in 2020 and began her PhD at Penn the same year.  She also twice received the Kress Foundation Fellowship Award to study Greek and Latin at the Latin-Greek Institute in New York, and has served as a Latin tutor for the past two years.  Cianna’s research interests continue to be in the vein of Greek poetry, Euripidean tragedy and various receptions of Greek tragedy, performance, Greek pottery, the comparison of image and text, tragic irony, and the interplay between gender, childhood, and ritual.