
Totally Classic
“It was clear from the day she got here that Jen would be a star, and she has more than fulfilled expectations,” says department chair Andrew Alwine. “The range and interdisciplinary flexibility of Jen’s teaching is somewhat mind-boggling.”
But there’s another, sweeter reason that makes her such a popular professor: the tasty cookies she regularly brings to classes and the classics suite. The frosted pastries often have a Roman theme to them, too, especially when she makes them for her annual Ides of March cookie party in the Cistern Yard attended by students past and present.
“I don’t have kids, but I imagine this is what you feel like on Christmas Day watching them opening presents,” says Gerrish. “That’s how I feel when I look at these generations of students, and they’re all there because they love Julius Caesar and they love cookies.”
And they love her, too. “She is much beloved – and not just for her amazing cookies,” says Alwine. “Jen is a team player, always haunting the halls of Randolph with cheer and concern for others. She is a great colleague who contributes substantially to the wider life of the department and College.”

“Classics is the greatest stories ever told,” says Gerrish, when asked what she loves about it. “The Trojan War, Julius Caesar: These are just such rich stories that give us this window into these amazing cultures of the past. It’s challenging, but you’re taking part in an intellectual tradition that has unfolded continuously for 2,000 years.”
Gerrish’s research focuses on the end of the Roman Republic and how a constitutional government with checks and balances designed to prevent autocracy fell apart after 450 years.
“There are lessons we can take from that,” she says. “All sides can agree that it’s a great privilege that we have this representative democracy that we can all participate in. But the Romans took that for granted, and then they lost it.”
The classics were all Greek to Gerrish growing up on the coast in Rockland, Maine. It wasn’t until her sophomore year at Vassar College, where she earned an A.B. in ancient societies in 2005, that she first became interested.
“I took an ancient Greek history class just to fill a requirement and fell in love with it,” she says, adding that the long Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta fascinated her. “One of the reasons that Athens loses the war is because they sort of fall prey to partisan infighting. There is so much at stake with Sparta threatening to wipe them out of existence, but they cannot get it together to save themselves.”
After earning a doctorate in classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012, she taught at Temple University for three years before landing at CofC, where classics is the oldest major.
“It’s really cool to know that I’m part of this legacy that thousands of students have studied in Randolph Hall,” she says. – Tom Cunneff