Kevin Westerfeld

Research Interests: I study Ancient Greek History and am broadly interested in the social, political, and institutional changes that take place within the Greek world following the Peloponnesian War at the start of the fourth century BCE. 

Working Dissertation Title: All Together Now: The Successes and Failures of Community Building in Xenophon’s Anabasis

My dissertation analyzes several of the most common strategies for community building employed by the Greeks of the Classical Period.  In particular I consider the way that religion, Panhellenism, stasis (or factionism) and ethnic identity function in the creation and preservation of a community, and assess the way each of these phenomena were mobilized, at times interdependently, in the building and maintenance of Greek communities at the start of the fourth century BCE.

To study these aspects of community building, I use Xenophon’s Anabasis, a firsthand account of ten thousand Greek mercenaries who fought in a Persian civil war in 401 BCE, and who, after the death of their Persian patron, were forced to band together and fight their way 1000 miles back to mainland Greece.  As a truly cosmopolitan assembly of Greeks, made up of men from cities throughout the Greek world, the successes and failures of the Ten Thousand in establishing what amounts to a civic community provide a unique insight into the most common strategies and devices employed in fostering communal bonds across a diverse group, as well as the practical limits to which these could be employed.

• BA in Philosophy, UC San Diego, 2016.
• MA in History, UC San Diego, 2020.