The TALOS Lab is pleased to announce the 5th TALOS PhD Meeting, which will take place on March 6, 2026, in hybrid format, onsite in Rethymno and online via Zoom. The TALOS PhD Meeting series offers doctoral researchers an important space to present ongoing work, exchange feedback with peers, and discuss methodological and conceptual questions central to their dissertations.

📅 Date: March 6, 2026
🕒 Time: 11:00–15:50 (Greek time)
📍 Venue: TALOS Conference Room, Building Γ, KEME/UCRC (Rethymno) & Online (Zoom link, passcode: 963535)
✉️ Contact: Maria Papadopoulou (maria.papadopoulou@uoc.gr)
📌 PhD group convenor: Fotini Koidaki (coidacis@gmail.com)

In this fifth session, TALOS PhD candidates and researchers will present current work on a wide range of topics, including semantic prosopography, Plutarchan studies, prompting and close reading, quantitative curriculum analysis through NLP, zoological terminology and ontoterminology, and iconographic metadata for Bronze Age Aegean material culture. Presentations will be delivered by Rachel Milio, Angelina Manola, Fotini Koidaki, Evangelos Katis, Giuliana Elizabeth Vilela Ruiz, and Melissa Bergoffen.

The meeting will conclude with a keynote/guest lecture by Emmanuela Schoinoplokaki (PhD Candidate in Classics, University of California, Santa Barbara, and member of the LOREL Lab), titled “Weaving the Threads: Connecting Classics, Social Justice, and Digital Humanities.” The lecture presents how Classical studies, social justice pedagogy, and digital humanities converge as a trans-disciplinary approach. Through case studies ranging from forced migration analysis in Attic tragedy to collaborative lab work and community-based pedagogy projects, it demonstrates how interdisciplinary approaches bridge ancient scholarship with contemporary sociopolitical issues, redefining both Classical inquiry and digital research practices.

Guest Bio
Emmanuela Schoinoplokaki (she/they pronouns) is a PhD candidate in Classics and a member of the Low-Resource Language Lab (LOREL Lab) of the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Their dissertation project critically investigates forced migration and agency of vulnerable collective protagonists of the fifth-century BCE Attic tragedy and computationally traces the data of their movements. Her research on contemporary forced migration, utilizing computational methods in Global South contexts, and on classical reception studies, is an additional joy for her. As Argyropoulos Graduate Fellow of Hellenic Studies, she taught modern Greek at UCSB and, generally, is a passionate mentor and award-winning teacher of various courses, such as race and ethnicity in the ancient Mediterranean. Emmanuela is also a social-justice scholar and educator who collaborates in global antiquity-related and public-facing projects, such as working with incarcerated students in California. She studied and researched at the universities of Crete, Heidelberg, and Oxford, as well as the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA), and the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City (DEAS-INAH).