Mythology/Religion

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

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

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