Two microphones flank WHRB’s multicolored switchboard. Five red zeros cross its screen and a pair of headphones lies next to a half-filled coffee cup. At 1 p.m., Elliot A. Wilson slips the headphones over his ears, flips a switch, and takes one last sip of coffee.

Introducing Mendelssohn’s “Piano Trio in C Minor” on air, Wilson speaks smoothly and formally, though he prefers the raspy vocal fry of punk rock DJ-ing. For Wilson, it’s classical baroque in the afternoon and wild, screaming punk at night.\xa0

He turns slightly to adjust the disc, revealing a printed sweatshirt that pays homage to a different sort of classical figure—Julius Caesar. Beside the Roman ruler’s stern-faced image, his sweatshirt lists Latin quotes.\xa0

Wilson discovered Latin in high school in St. Louis, Mo., where he competed in the National Junior Classical League. Now the classics concentrator, recently elected to the Phi Beta Kappa Senior 48, prefers Greek. His thesis explores the 40 years of instability in Macedonia following the death of Alexander the Great.\xa0

But like his diametric music tastes, Wilson’s academic interests lie at each end of the high-low spectrum and \xa0at many points in between, from traditional history and canonical literature to what he calls “the weird stuff.” \xa0

He recalls a factoid he came across while reading about King Pyrrhus for his thesis. The Greek ruler, one account claimed, could cure diseases of the spleen with his big toe. Pyrrhus apparently administered these healing powers in exchange for the sacrifice of a rooster.\xa0

“It’s sort of a punk-rock approach to classics,” Wilson says of the off-color scholarship. From Mendelssohn to metal, Troy to toes.\xa0

Another project led Wilson to discover that the ancient societies of the Mediterranean were deeply afraid of beans. Some ancient Egyptians, apparently, forbade the consumption of beans because they resembled testicles; others believed that they contained the soul.

“Read the footnotes,” Wilson advises. “This is the kind of stuff you don’t read articles about, but it’s in the footnotes because classicists are universally bizarre.”\xa0

Wilson, who plans to pursue a Ph.D. in classics, has fully embraced the discipline’s humorous side. Two years ago, Wilson started a Tumblr blog called “likeavirgil” (a post elaborates “Like a Virgil, translated for the very first time”), with GIFs and quips about classical studies. Recently, he created a spin-off blog called “Official Sappho,” which attributes contemporary quotations and hashtags like #notallmen to the ancient poet.

On demand, Wilson recounts his favorite classics joke. “I was in Greece\xa0a couple thousand years ago, wearing one of my favorite pairs of khakis. Everything was fine until I ripped them on a thorn bush. Because this was a couple thousand years ago, before freshman year, I didn’t know Greek yet. So I went to the nearest tailor and kind of gestured at the torn khakis. The tailor said, ‘Euripides?’ I said, ‘Yeah, Eumenides?’”\xa0

Wilson’s fascination with “the weird stuff” of classics springs from a larger desire to explore aspects of the ancient world left out of traditional narratives.\xa0

“I can’t get around the fact that I’m studying the deadest, whitest men,” he explains. “Part of the fun is seeing the ways in which the ancient world overturns our expectations.”

Sometimes, of course, humor is just humor. In what he describes as a drunken decision on the night of the deadline for UC candidate statements, Wilson launched a “campaign” for Adams House representative based entirely on the need for trashcans in dorm rooms.\xa0

“Yes we can, and we can can every room with a can,” read emails sent to potential voters. Posters promised “a trash can in every room, Elliot in every UC.”