Professor Thalmann's special interests are Greek epic and drama. In particular, using anthropological and other theories, he studies the ways in which performances of ancient texts were the occasion for the convergence of class and gender discourses and the role of these texts within contemporary social and political processes, especially at times of great social change.  He is currently writing a book on geography and the production of space in the Argonautika of Apollonius of Rhodes, treating the poem as an imaginative projection of questions about cultural identity that the Greeks faced in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.  

In the Classics Department, he teaches graduate courses on Greek literature of various periods and genres and on ancient slavery, as well as undergraduate language courses and General Education courses on Greek literature and culture.  In Comparative Literature, he teaches courses on epic poetry, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Los Angeles crime fiction.  He is also editor for the ancient world of the Norton Anthology of World Literature.

Nathan Graeser most recently acted as the executive director of the 1887 Fund. Formerly he was a community program administrator for the Center for Innovation and Research for Veteran and Military Families (CIR) at the USC School of Social Work, where he directed the Los Angeles Veterans Collaborative and Innovation Fund—a collective-impact group that consists of more than 2,000 different service providers throughout Los Angeles County with over 250 regularly attending monthly meetings. Graeser has served in the U.S. Army National Guard for nearly 17 years, including as a chaplain for combat arms battalion the last five years. Graeser has educated hundreds of service providers on military culture and supporting transition out of the military, developing better community policies as people return home from war. He obtained a Master of Divinity from Fuller Theological Seminary and then a Master of Social Work focusing on military populations at the University of Southern California. Graeser has been recognized for his innovative inclusion of ceremonies for transitioning veterans, as well as his creative and realistic approach to building capacity for communities and mental health providers treating veterans. He serves on numerous local and national boards and was recently recognized by USC Center for Religion and Civic Culture and the Interreligious Council of Southern California as one of 50 leaders working in the intersection of faith and social change.

Paula Cizmar is an associate professor of theatre practice in dramatic writing at the USC School of Dramatic Arts. She is an award-winning playwright and librettist whose work combines poetry and politics and is concerned with the way stories get told in a culture and with who gets left out of the discussion. Her plays have been produced all over the country, in theatres big and small, including Portland Stage, San Diego Rep, The Women’s Project (NYC), Jungle Theatre (Minneapolis), Cal Rep and Playwrights Arena @ LATC. Plays include January, Still Life with Parrot & Monkey, Strawberry, The Chisera, Candy & Shelley Go to the Desert, Street Stories and Along the River, Almost Winter, which was part of Lab Results at the Antaeus Theatre. Cizmar was one of the seven women writers commissioned by Center Theatre Group and Playwrights Arena to write The Hotel Play, a site-specific, immersive theatre piece that marked the 25th anniversary of the Los Angeles uprising in 1992; it was produced in guest rooms and on the grounds of the downtown Radisson Hotel in March to April 2017.

Her many honors include two NEA grants, an international residency at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, and a TCG/Mellon Foundation On the Road grant. She has had her work selected for Sundance, the O’Neill National Playwrights Conference and EnVision at Bard. She is one of the writers of the documentary play Seven, which has been translated into 20-plus languages and has been produced in over 30 countries — including Turkey, Lithuania, Argentina, Nigeria, Japan and Serbia — to generate dialogue about human rights. It was also produced by LA Theatre Works as an audible book and won Best Audio Book in the memoir category. It has aired on public radio in the U.S. and China. She has been awarded numerous commissions and has done adaptations — including Antigone X, an update of the Sophocles classic set in a modern-day refugee camp (published by NoPassport Press), and Norteño, a darkly comedic riff on a 17th-century Lope de Vega play about a peasant uprising gone wrong, performed at Golden Tongues 2. Her play The Last Nights of Scheherazade won the Israel Baran Award.

Also a librettist, she was selected by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute of Warsaw to be a part of the Paderewski Cycle. This project, Golden — book and lyrics by Paula Cizmar, music by Nathan Wang — is a musical that combines social justice issues with entertainment. She also wrote the libretto for The Night Flight of Minerva’s Owl, music by Guang Yang. The opera was selected for Pittsburgh Festival Opera’s Music that Matters program in 2018 and will receive its world premiere at PFO in 2020.

Cizmar founded the Deep Map Theatre Project, which allows her undergraduate playwrights the opportunity to write and perform pop-up plays about current events issues in a street-theatre style. She is a winner of a Mellon Mentoring Award for Mentoring Undergraduates at USC and has produced multiple events for USC Visions and Voices: The Arts and Humanities Initiative. She is a member of the Playwrights Lab at Antaeus Theatre. For more information, visit www.paulacizmar.net.

A filmmaker and educator, Bodie teaches courses in filmmaking, immersive docu-narrative installation, and media for social change. He began his career working for Sundance Institute’s Feature Film and Theatre Programs where he participated in the development of independent artists and their projects including Me and You and Everyone We Know, Grey Gardens, and Passing Strange, among many others. After attending UCLA’s School of Film & Television graduate directing program he returned to Sundance as their content producer where he directed an eight part documentary web series about their prestigious labs. Bodie was integral to the inception and direction of the Sundance Film Festival’s live-stream coverage, and continues to executive produce and direct their festival video content to this day.

He has written and directed award winning short films and other video projects that have aired on MTVu, Logo, and the Sundance Channel, and has partnered with music artist ShyBoy, to create videos for his tracks, "Bird in Flight", "Wouldn't It Be Good", and "Backroom". Bodie's work has screened at domestic and international film festivals and exhibited as part of the Los Angeles Public Library’s To Live and Dine in L.A. in which food culture and issues of food justice were examined. For the past two years he has been a key collaborator on a USC Arts in Action funded program, Warrior Bards, that provides US veterans the opportunity to study ancient Greek plays, discuss them through the lens of their own military experience, and respond to their discoveries through artistic practice.

Professor Farenga has been teaching Classics and Comparative Literature at USC since 1973 and was chair of Comparative Literature from 1984-91. In Classics his interests include Greek history and literature (Homer to Alexander the Great) and Greek political history and thought.  He teaches courses on the lives of famous Greeks and Romans as we seen in antiquity and in contemporary media, Athenian democracy, Alexander the Great. In Comparative Literature he teaches courses on great thinkers and writers from antiquity to today and on contemporary world literature and theories of social justice. 

More recently he has been exploring topics in moral and political philosophy like the nature of the self, types of authority, and forms of testimony (witnessing). He also works on trauma studies and PTSD in relation to testimonial literature and genres like Greek tragedy, modern autobiography, and the novel.

Among his publications are Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece: Individuals Performing Justice and the Law(Cambridge UP) (translated and published in China in 2018), and he is now writing a book on testimony, injustice, and authoritative speech.