Dr. Cynthia "Cara" Polsley
Contact Info
Biography —
Dr. Cynthia “Cara” Polsley is a classical philologist, researcher, and commentator, teaching on ancient languages, civilizations, and narratology in a wide range of contexts. She is co-founder of the technological start-up Cordical LC and author of numerous fiction and non-fiction books. A spinal cord injury survivor, she is also a motivational speaker, frequently speaking to groups of different ages and backgrounds. When not working (and, happily, when working), she can often be found reading classic science fiction.
Education —
Research —
Cara’s research emphasizes practical philology and worldview exposition. She especially focuses on contrafactuals, alternative realities, and possible worlds as conveyed through modality, narratological framing, and reception. Her work brings concepts of the holographic universe, simulated worlds, and the multiverse together with grammatical analysis and commentary studies. Cara’s science fiction series Ifscapes explores an ancient multiverse of “what-if”/CTF short stories and translations based on classical texts and authors, while her non-fiction similarly investigates reality and world-shaping across time. She regularly presents on narrative choice and grammar as vehicles for social observation and intersections of content and context.
Research interests:
- Contrafactuality
- Narratology
- Greco-Roman cultural interaction
- Indo-European poetic inheritances
- Multiverse and holographic studies
- Social commentary
Selected Publications —
The Sky Is Our Song (Aratus). Translator Stanley Lombardo and Co-Contributor Walter Michener. University of Chicago, 2024, forthcoming.
Battle at the Forks. Braxleydale Press, 2024.
The Bible and the Holographic Universe. Wipf & Stock, 2022.
A Braxleydale Scholar and Other Eccentricities, 2020.
Ifscapes: Empires and Androids (A Multiverse of Short Stories Inspired by the Ancient Past and Future), 2020.