Summer Writing Grant Profiles

Every summer, the Humanities Institute funds up to four $6,000 competitive Summer Writing Grants for university faculty working in the humanities to complete or make significant progress on a manuscript for a monograph that is either under contract or in which a publisher has indicated written interest.

During the Spring 2026 semester, Madison Burba (WFU ’28), HI Student Communications Assistant, conducted interviews with all of the 2025 grant recipients.

The first two profiles below are with Dr. Michael Grigoni from the Department for the Study of Religions and Dr. T. H. M. Gellar-Goad from the Department of Classics.

Look for Madison’s interviews with Dr. Ebony Flowers (English/Creative Writing) and Dr. Molly MacVeagh (Interdisciplinary Humanities) in the May 2026!

2025-2026 Interviews

Dr. T.H.M. Gellar-Goad

Interview by Madison Burba (WFU ’28)

What does a 2,000-year-old Roman comedy have in common with the 1990s sitcom Seinfeld? According to Wake Forest classics professor THM Gellar-Goad, quite a lot.

With support from the Wake Forest Humanities Institute’s Summer 2025 grant, Gellar-Goad recently completed a book that places ancient Roman comedy in conversation with one of television’s most famous shows. The project blends classical scholarship with modern pop culture, revealing surprising similarities in how humor works across centuries.

Gellar-Goad, a professor of Classics at Wake Forest, teaches Latin, Greek, and courses on ancient Greece and Rome in translation. Much of his scholarship focuses on Roman poetry and comedy. But the idea for this project began more than a decade ago, when he was invited to speak at a conference on Roman comedy and asked to address the topic of “reception”—the study of how elements of Greek and Roman culture appear in later works.

“I wasn’t really a specialist in reception,” he said. “So I was like, what on earth do I know that I can connect to Roman comedy? And I thought about it and made this connection with Seinfeld.”

The connection also had a personal origin. Gellar-Goad first watched the series in college with his husband and quickly became a devoted fan. Over the years, he revisited the show again and again. “I’ve watched the whole series five times,” he shared. 

What began as a conference paper eventually grew into a short book, now under contract with Cambridge University Press as part of the Cambridge Elements of Greek and Roman Drama and Performance series. The Humanities Institute grant gave Gellar-Goad the time he needed to finish the manuscript.

“The grant was to give me the chance to just spend a couple of months dedicated to writing,” he said. 

In the book, Gellar-Goad places Roman comedy and Seinfeld side by side, examining how both rely on similar comedic techniques. Rather than arguing that the sitcom directly borrowed from ancient plays, he uses each to shed light on the other.

“What I’m mainly doing is taking these two extensive bodies of comic literature and putting them in conversation with one another,” he said.

One technique he explores is “pseudo improvisation” when characters appear to be inventing dialogue on the spot, even though the scene is carefully scripted. 

One example occurs when Jerry tries to convince an old high school rival that he fairly won a foot race years earlier. To prove it, Jerry recruits George to pretend they have not seen each other since high school when they meet at a coffee shop. But George quickly gets sidetracked, launching into an elaborate story about being an architect, while Jerry begins teasing him about it. The two end up arguing and nearly derail their entire plan, turning the scene into a chaotic back-and-forth that feels improvised even though it follows a script.

The comparison is especially useful because the two forms of comedy survive in very different ways. Ancient Roman comedies exist mostly as scripts, often without stage directions or details about performance. 

“With Seinfeld we’ve got recordings of performances and lots of information about how audiences responded,” Gellar-Goad said. “What can that information tell us about what’s lost from ancient Roman comedy?”

To prepare for the project, Gellar-Goad rewatched the entire nine-season series with a researcher’s eye, cataloguing patterns in jokes, plot structures, and character interactions. “By the time I finished, I had about 18,000 words of notes,” he said.

Despite the analytical work involved, Gellar-Goad says the project was one of the most enjoyable he has written. “It was a lot of fun writing the book,” he said. “Some of the scenes I focused on were so hilarious.”

Gellar-Goad’s work proves that more than two millennia after Roman playwrights first staged their comedies, audiences are still laughing at many of the same techniques, whether they appear in an ancient theater or a New York coffee shop on Seinfeld.

Dr. Michael Grigoni

Interview by Madison Burba (WFU ’28)

A faculty member in Wake Forest University’s Department for the Study of Religions, Grigoni is using his Summer 2025 Humanities Institute Writing Grant to complete The Gun in American Christian Life: An Ethnographic Ethics, a book that examines how Christian belief shapes the lived realities of gun ownership in the United States. 

His project sits at the intersection of religion, ethics, and everyday practice—but what sets it apart is how deeply embedded his research is in the lives of the people he studies.

“I entered doctoral studies wanting to do ethnographically grounded ethics,” Grigoni explained, emphasizing his desire to move beyond abstract theory and instead focus on lived experience.

That commitment led him to spend over a year conducting fieldwork with Christian handgun owners in central North Carolina. Rather than simply observing from afar, Grigoni immersed himself in the community: “I spent a year conducting participant-observation with Christian handgun owners, hanging out, interviewing, and learning to shoot with them.”

As part of this process, he even became a gun owner himself; an act he describes as necessary to doing ethnographic work “as immersively as possible.”

This level of participation allowed Grigoni to see beyond assumptions he initially carried into the project. One of the most surprising moments came when he encountered a concealed carry instructor who framed firearm use through a Christian lens.

Grigoni took the course twice and found an approach that challenged common stereotypes. Rather than encourage aggression, the instructor emphasized restraint: his approach was “very disciplined, and he drew on scripture to critique bravado and machismo.” More broadly, Grigoni observed that “among my interlocutors, Christianity seemed to play a restraining role in their gun carry,” complicating the idea that religion simply reinforces pro-gun attitudes.

Grigoni’s interest in this topic grew out of both personal and national contexts. During his PhD at Duke University, conversations about race and policing following the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown prompted him to consider the role of guns in American life.

At the same time, his move from the Pacific Northwest to the South exposed him to a different cultural landscape. As he began researching, he realized that “not much had been written about guns from a Christian ethical perspective,” motivating him to pursue the project.

Later in his fieldwork, Grigoni encountered a second community that would become central to his book: the Religious Coalition for a Nonviolent Durham. After attending a vigil for a victim of gun violence, he began studying the group, which hosts public vigils to “memorialize the loss of Durham residents to gun homicide.”

This experience introduced what he describes as “a different orientation to guns and gun violence by persons of Christian commitment.” His book ultimately places the two groups, the handgun owners and the vigil participants, in conversation, asking what one can reveal about the other. 

Grigoni describes his project as “thoroughly interdisciplinary,” bringing together ethnography, social theory, and Christian ethics that “follows a recent turn to qualitative methods among Christian ethicists.”

Now under contract with Fordham University Press, the manuscript is nearing completion, and the Summer Writing Grant has played a key role in that progress, allowing Grigoni to “carve out space and time” during the long process of revising a dissertation into a book.

Ultimately, Grigoni’s work is grounded in a simple but demanding practice: listening. Whether in shooting ranges or at vigils, his research depends on careful attention to people whose perspectives may differ sharply from one another, and from his own.

“I hope to open space for a more nuanced conversation about guns and religion in American life,” said Grigoni.