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;

Cassandra is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics and affiliated faculty of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University. She’s also the Spring 2027 recipient of the Tytus Fellowship awarded by the University of Cincinnati.

Before arriving at Wake Forest University, she was the 2021-2022 Crake Classics Fellow at Mount Allison University. Additionally, she was the winner of the Classical Association of Canada’s 2022 Graduate Student Presentation Prize, and her research was featured in NYU’s Center for Ancient Studies’ Emerging Scholars Series in 2021.

Cassandra’s research interests include Latin literature, gender and sexuality, and race and ethnicity—particularly the intersections between Asian America/Canada and Classics. She is currently working on her first monograph, entitled Unsettling Rape: Reproduction and Temporality in Roman Comedy, where she draws from feminist, queer, and critical race theory to show how Plautus and Terence destabilized the pronatalist logic underwriting rape-reproduction plots in the comic genre. Her critical reading of the plays attends to, on the one hand, female subjectivity and resistance amid sexual and reproductive violence and, on the other hand, the (in)fertility consequences upon male assaulters who performed comic rape incorrectly or rejected the reproductive effects of rape altogether.