Doctoral Student Fellow

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Classics

Expecting the Unexpected – How Ancient Lyrics Makes Us Feel

Pei He is a Fellow at the NYU Center for the Humanities and a PhD candidate in Classics. Driven by a central interest in how and why literary texts evoke deep emotional reactions, her dissertation draws on cognitive psychology to investigate how abrupt structural turning points in Sappho and Horace shape readerly affect and expand interpretive terrain. Her scholarship frequently bridges ancient literature with modern theoretical lenses, encompassing feminist, queer, psychoanalytic, and Bakhtinian perspectives. Pei brings a uniquely interdisciplinary academic background to her research, holding a PhD in Statistics from Stanford University, an MA in Comparative Literature from San Francisco State University, and a BA in Mathematical Decision Sciences from UNC–Chapel Hill.