Language/Literature

Botanical Knowledge and Vegetal Poetics in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry

My current research aims to answer three interrelated questions: (a) What did the botanical knowledge of the archaic and the classical Greek era look like?; (b) how and why did it offer the Greek authors of the time convenient ways of thinking (analogically) about other experiences and realms of speculation, such as society, kinship ties, or the body?; and (c) can the study of the ancient botanical knowledge ultimately help… Read more

Jewish Poets, Greek Poetry: Contextualizing Jewish-Greek Poetry as Post-Classical Literature

This project focuses on Jewish identity in antiquity, analyzing the relationship between literary practices, identity construction, and multilingualism in the ancient world through the study of Jewish poetic writings in Greek. It restores the status of Jewish-Greek poetry as literary works and their authors as legitimate voices of a Jewish identity. In the study of post-classical Greek literature, Jewish poets have been routinely neglected because they are not seen as… Read more

Musical evidence for low boundary tones in ancient Greek*

Several scholars have posited a word- or clitic group-final low boundary tone for ancient Greek. The boundary tone would motivate accentual phenomena including the conversion of a word-final acute to a grave phrase-internally as well as the diachronic pitch-peak retraction that led to circumflex accents on penultimate syllables. The effects of such a low boundary tone should be audible in ancient Greek non-strophic vocal music, where there is a greater-than-chance… Read more

Phoenicians Among Others: How Migration and Mobility Transformed the Mediterranean

I spent a productive Fall semester 2020 at the Center for Hellenic Studies, where I worked on my second book project, Phoenicians Among Others: How Migration and Mobility Transformed the Ancient Mediterranean. The book offers a history of migration of individuals from Phoenician city-states mainly in the fourth-century BCE and primarily in the Greek world. My project shows that migration was a driver for many of the formative changes in… Read more