Cassandra Tran

Cassandra Tran
Assistant Professor (2022)
BA, Queen’s University; MA, McMaster University; PhD, McMaster University
Office Location: Tribble C308
Contact: (336) 758-5330; tranc@wfu.edu

Cassandra Tran completed her PhD in Classics from McMaster University in 2023. She was the 2021-2022 Crake Classics Fellow at Mount Allison University and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University the following year. She was awarded the Graduate Student Presentation Prize at the Classical Association of Canada’s 2022 Annual Meeting for her paper on olfactory costuming in Plautus’ Casina, and her research has been featured in the 2021 Emerging Scholars Series at NYU’s Center for Ancient Studies.

Cassandra’s scholarship focusses on Roman Comedy and gender and sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean world. Her research and teaching interests broadly include ancient drama, Augustan poetry, queer and gender theory, race and ethnicity, and Classical reception. In her dissertation, she identified a pattern of gender manipulation and investigated its destabilizing effects in character studies from plays by Plautus and Terence. Cassandra’s current project explores queer (that is, non-hetero-patriarchal) temporalities in Roman Comedy. In particular, she addresses questions about futurity in comic households, especially regarding expectations of marriage, reproduction, and inheritance.