Archive

History, Language/Literature

Portraits of a Pharaoh: The Sesostris Tradition in Ancient Literature and Culture

When Greeks and Romans thought about Pharaonic Egypt, they would have named Sesostris as the land’s most iconic ruler. From his first appearance in Herodotus’ Histories to his afterlife in Byzantine historians, the Sesostris character played the roles of world-conqueror and Egyptian culture hero in Greek and Roman texts. Yet, while the Sesostris character was a creation of legend, he was based on three pharaohs of the Egyptian 12th Dynasty… Read more

Language/Literature

Theater of the Home Front: Gendered Trauma in Greek Tragedy

In plays about war and homecoming, male and female characters are both traumatized by the extreme events that disrupt their lives, but structural forces, including gender and class hierarchies, shape their pain in different ways, affecting how these characters react to and express their pain, trauma, and grief in performance. These same structural forces also determine how other characters - and the external audience - respond to their expressions of… Read more

History

Watchdogs of the People: Demagogues and Popular Culture in Ancient Greece

I spent a wonderful (all things considered) Spring semester 2020 at the Center for Hellenic Studies, where I worked primarily on my second book project, Watchdogs of the People: Demagogues, Populism, and Popular Culture in Ancient Greece, but also related projects. My book, which will be the first history of the phenomenon of demagoguery (or the “(mis)leading of the people”) across Greek antiquity, aims both to explain the emergence of… Read more

Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

Uncanny Intruders

My main project at CHS this semester, provisionally entitled Uncanny Intruders, seeks to understand Greek literature’s fascination with what Sarah Johnston has called the “returning dead,” from the Homeric poems to Heliodorus’ Ethiopian Story. It demonstrates how an engagement with anthropological approaches to the history and phenomenology of ancient religious experience can deepen and complicate readings of literary texts. In addition, I have also been working on a collaborative project… Read more

Language/Literature, Mythology/Religion

The Poetics of Distress, the Rape of the Heavenly Maiden, and the Most Ancient Sleeping Beauty: Oralistic, Linguistic, and Comparative Perspectives on the (Pre-)Historical Development of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter

Often compared with West Asian and Egyptian texts, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (hereafter Hymn) and the other variants of the myth of Demeter and Persephone-Kore have a number of onomastic, phraseological, and thematic parallels in texts composed in other Indo-European languages. By means of an oralistic, linguistic, and comparative approach, my research aims to, firstly, reconstruct the common background of the Hymn and its Indo-European counterparts on the strength… Read more