Faculty Research

Kelcy Sagstetter
Professor, History Department

Kelcy Sagstetter, currently a Professor of History at the Naval Academy, completed her PhD in 2013 in Ancient History at the University of Pennsylvania. Before coming to to USNA in 2015, she worked as an adjunct professor at UPenn, and as a Visiting Professor of Classics at Oberlin College, where she taught a variety of courses in Ancient Greek and Roman history, Latin, and Greek. She specializes in Ancient Greek political and social history, with an emphasis on material culture, and has participated in archaeological projects all over the world. She spent two years living and working in Athens, where she traveled extensively and visited archaeological sites conducting dissertation research. Her current book project re-examines the 6th c. BCE figure of Solon of Athens, arguing that he was not, in fact, the proto-democratic reformer we read about in our later sources, but that his activities fall more closely in line with archaic tyrants. She also participated in a joint project with the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies at the University of Arkansas, which examined ancient inscriptions with a 3D white light scanner. The goal was to determine if they could find letters too eroded to be seen with the naked eye with digitally enhanced 3D images, as well as a photogrammetric technique called Reflectance Transformation Imaging. They were in fact able to confirm several controversial readings and restore some letters. She recently submitted an article re-examining an inscription that describes the procedure by which ancient Athenian youths became citizens.