Language/Literature

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

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

Language/Literature

Materiality and Aesthetics in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry

Citation with persistent identifier: Lather, Amy. “Materiality and Aesthetics in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry.” CHS Research Bulletin 8 (2020). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:LatherA.Materiality_and_Aesthetics_in_Archaic_and_Classical_Greek_Poetry.2020 In its interest in aesthetic experience as a form of interaction between humans and things, my study contributes to the growing body of work in the humanities devoted to uncovering the… Read more

Language/Literature, Philosophy/Science

Ars Brevis: Temporal and Exegetical Compressions in Greco-Roman and Islamicate Medicine

Citation with persistent identifier: Das, Aileen. “Ars Brevis: Temporal and Exegetical Compressions in Greco-Roman and Islamicate Medicine.” CHS Research Bulletin 8 (2020). http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:hlnc.essay:DasA.Ars_Brevis.2020 My previous work on the medieval Islamicate reception of Plato’s Timaeus, which circulated in Arabic through the Greek physician Galen’s (d. c. 217 CE) summary of the dialogue, has… Read more