Clara Rae Marie Bosak-Schroeder

Clara Bosak-Schroeder (she/they) is a multi-disciplinary creative writer, literary critic, and cultural historian. Clara joined the Classics department of Illinois in 2015 where she is also an affiliate of History, Medieval Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

Since joining Illinois, Clara has won a Faculty Fellowship from the Humanities Research Institute (2017-2018), a Junior Fellowship from the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory (2018-2020), a LEAP Scholar Award (2018-2020), a Junior Fellowship from the Illinois Center for Advanced Study (2021-2022), a COVID-19 Revitalization Fellowship (2025-2026) and a General Education Innovation Award (2025-2026).

Clara’s first book, Other Natures: Environmental Encounters with Ancient Greek Ethnography, was published with UC Press in 2020 and considers how Greek writers represented the relationship between humans and other species. My Own Specimen, in progress, considers similar questions through a collection of personal essays: how do we make sense of embodied experience of kinship, grief, gender, and reproduction? Do appeals to what is “natural” constrain or liberate us?

Other current projects include articles on graduate pedagogy, the history of the University of Illinois, metaphors of disability in classical scholarship, and how classical studies has been used to shape Black American authorship. 

Clara has curated exhibits at the Krannert Art Museum and the Spurlock Museum of World Cultures. They founded and continue to advise CripAntiquity, an advocacy organization for neurodivergent and disabled people in ancient studies.

classical reception studies; creative nonfiction; museum practice; classics and the environmental humanities; Greek and Roman historiography and technical literature; feminist science studies and new materialisms

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