Mary Bachvarova

Mary R. Bachvarova is Professor in the Department of Classical Studies at Willamette University, Oregon. She received her A.B. in Classics from Harvard/Radcliffe College and her PhD from the Committee on the History of Culture at University of Chicago. Her research focus is comparative religion and literature in the ancient East Mediterranean. She is the co-editor of two volumes, Anatolian Interfaces: Hittites, Greeks and Their Neighbors (with B. J. Collins and I. C. Rutherford, 2008) and The Fall of Cities: Commemoration in Literature, Folk Song, and Liturgy (with D. Dutsch and A. Suter, 2016), and the author of From Hittite to Homer: The Anatolian Background of Greek Epic (2016). Whereas in her previous monograph she focused on how epic narratives were carried across geographic and linguistic barriers in the ancient eastern Mediterranean, in the monograph currently in progress, Calling the Gods: How Cult Practices Moved across Space and Time in the Ancient Eastern Mediterranean, she focuses on the prayers, making visible the processes of transmission and reworking of verbal art by focusing on archaeologically salient items and practices presented in the texts as effecting the gods’ movement.