Research Areas

Ancient Greek literature and cultural history, Archaic Greek poetry, Herodotus and early prose, Greek popular culture, the constitution of ideology through material practices, genre, the politics of form

Biography

I am currently writing a book on ancient Greek chorality (in Greek, choreia) that sets in dialogue the theorizations of fifth- and fourth-century prose writers (Herodotus, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristotle) with the internal “theorizing” of older Greek poetic texts. In archaic and classical Greece, all poetry was composed to be performed, and one central performance mode was by groups of non-professionals, usually segregated by age and gender, who sang and danced in unison, in a public dancing place. Choruses were an essential component of social and religious life in the ancient Greek city—a means to forge communion with the gods as well as constitute human community among performers and spectators. Choral performance was such a central aspect of culture that it became for the Greeks an image for many different kinds of orderly, cooperative and/or hierarchical groups: thus many Greek texts refer to the circular “dance of the stars,” or cosmic dance, while in some cities, Choros (dancing place) was the name given to the central agora or gathering space that defined the polis. The book focuses on several different native Greek ways of thinking about, or thinking with, choreia. The combination of different kinds of sources allows me to tease out different aspects of the Greeks’ modelling and imagining of chorality: choreia as a form of bodily discipline, choreia as a model for hierarchical or egalitarian politics, and choreia as an assemblage of disparate parts. The logic of starting with the later prose texts is that they offer explicit theorizing and sociological analysis of what may be misrecognized, or not explicitly articulated, in earlier poetic sources, while the poetic sources by and large offer us a more vivid phenomenology and aesthetics of the experience of choreia (from the twin perspectives of dancers and audience).

I have spent much of my research life working on ancient Greek literature and cultural history, with special emphasis on archaic Greek poetry in its social context; Herodotus and early prose; ancient Greek popular culture; the constitution of ideology through material practices; and the interactions of performed poetry and architectural space. Each of my four earlier books explores different interactions of word and world, of literature and its “others.” The Traffic in Praise (1991/2013) traced the imbrication of Pindar’s victory odes in different economic, social, and political systems in fifth-century BCE Greece. Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold (1999) analyzed literary texts together with a whole set of symbolic signifying practices in the Greek archaic period. By linking the imagery of metals and coinage to stories about oracles, prostitutes, Eastern tyrants, counterfeiting, retail trade, and games, the book traces the rising egalitarian ideology of the city, as well as the ongoing resistance of an elitist tradition to that development. My third book, Aesopic Conversations (2011), used the figure of the non-Greek slave Aesop and traditions about his life to excavate ancient Greek popular culture in ongoing dialogue with the texts of Greek high culture. My fourth book, co-authored with the art historian Richard Neer, Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology (2019), read the occasional poems of Pindar together with their archaeological and architectural surround in performance as cooperative technologies for “making place” and for the ordering of space and place.

I was educated at Bryn Mawr College (BA Greek literature) and Princeton University (MA, PhD, Classics) and held a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard before joining the faculty at UC Berkeley in 1990. At Berkeley, I am a member of the Departments of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies and Comparative Literature, and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

Publications

Books

Co-Authored with Richard Neer, Pindar, Song, and Space: Towards a Lyric Archaeology (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).

Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton University Press, 2011).

Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece (Princeton University Press, 1999).

The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Cornell University Press, 1991; Second online edition: California Classical Studies Number 1, eScholarship Repository, 2013; http://escholarship.org/uc/item/29r3j0gm).

Edited Volumes

Editor (with Margaret Foster and Naomi Weiss), Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill, 2020).

Editor (with Carol Dougherty), The Cultures Within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration (Cambridge University Press, 2003; Paperback reprint, Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Editor (with Carol Dougherty), Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics. (Cambridge University Press, 1993; Paperback reprint, Oxford University Press, 1998).

Articles and Book Chapters

“Through a Glass Darkly: The Mirror in Euripides’ Hippolytus.” TAPA 155.2 (2025): 309-40.

“Musical Animals, Choral Assemblages, and Choral Temporality in Sappho’s Tithonus Poem (fr. 58),” American Journal of Philology 142 (2021): 1-39.

“Epinikion, Kudos, and Criticism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sport and Spectacle, ed. A. Futtrell and T. Scanlon (Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 305-19.

“Sappho and Genre,” In The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, ed. P. Finglass and A. Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2021), pp. 93-106.

“Introduction” (with M. Foster and N. Weiss), in Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill, 2020), pp. 1-28.

“For Mark” (with M. Telò), Classical Antiquity 39.2 (2020): i-iii.

“The ‘Rough Stones’ of Aegina: Pindar, Pausanias, and the Topography of Aeginetan Justice.” Classical Antiquity 36.2 (2017): 236-87. 

“Gendered Spheres and Mythic Models in Sappho’s Brothers Poem,” in The Newest Sappho: P. Sapph. Obbink and P. GC. inv. 105 Frs. 1-4, ed. A. Bierl and A. Lardinois (Mnemosyne Supplements vol. 392, 2016), pp. 238-65. 

“Pindar’s Material Imaginary: Dedication and Politics in Olympian 7.” UCL Housman Lecture 2015 (Published as Pamphlet, London, 2016), pp. 1-43.

“Pindar’s Pythian 11 and the Oresteia: Historicist Hermeneutics and Contestatory Ritual Poetics.” In Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics, ed. I. Kliger and B. Maslov (Fordham University Press, 2016), pp. 90-127. 

“A Dedicated Theory Class for Graduate Students.” Classical World 108.2 (2015): 183-94.

“Pindar Fr. 75 SM and the Politics of Athenian Space” (with R. T. Neer), Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 54 (2014): 527-79.

“Pindar’s Pythian 11 and the Oresteia: Contestatory Ritual Poetics in the Fifth Century BCE,” Classical Antiquity 32.1 (2013): 101-175.

“Imagining Chorality: Wonder, Plato’s Puppets, and Moving Statues,” in Performance and Culture in Plato’s Laws, ed. A.-E. Peponi (Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 123-170.

“Greek Ways of Speaking (Aggressively): The Case of ὑπολαβὼν ἔφη.” Classics@ Issue 11 (Online Classics Journal, 2013; Access via chs.harvard.edu; http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=5138).

“The Value of Chorality in Ancient Greece,” in The Construction of Value in the Ancient World, ed. J. Papadopoulos and G. Urton (Cotsen Institute Papers, 2012), pp. 218-35.

  “Greek Poetry, Classical” (rev. of entry originally composed by C. J. Herington), Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton University Press, 2012) pp. 576-82, 585-86.

“‘Counterfeit Oracles’ and ‘Legal Tender’: The Politics of Oracular Consultation in Herodotus,” Classical World 102.4 (2009): 417-38.

“Archaic Greek Poetry,” in The Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece, ed. H. A. Shapiro (Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 141-68.

“Visualizing the Choral: Epichoric Poetry, Ritual, and Elite Negotiation in Fifth-Century Thebes,” in Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature, ed. C. Kraus, S. Goldhill, H. P. Foley, and J. Elsner (Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 63-101.

“Plato, Aesop, and the Beginnings of Mimetic Prose,” Representations 94 (1996): 6-52.

“Choral Lyric as ‘Ritualization’: Poetic Sacrifice and Poetic Ego in Pindar’s Sixth Paian,” Classical Antiquity 24 (2005): 81-130.

“Introduction: The Cultures within Greek Culture,” (with C. Dougherty) in The Cultures Within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1-19.

“Aesop and the Contestation of Delphic Authority,” in The Cultures Within Ancient Greek Culture: Contact, Conflict, Collaboration, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 77-100.

“Gender, Politics, and Subversion in the Chreiai of Machon,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 48 (2002): 20-65.

“Greek Games and Ideologies in the Archaic and Classical Periods,” Paragrana: Internationale Zeitschrift für Historische Anthropologie 11.1 (2002): 15-50.

“Money and Mythic History: The Contestation of Transactional Orders in the Fifth Century BC,” in The Ancient Economy, ed. W. Scheidel and S. von Reden (Edinburgh University Press, 2002), pp. 88-113.

“The Strangeness of ‘Song Culture’: Archaic Greek Poetry,” and “Charting the Poles of History: Herodotos and Thoukydides,” in Literature in the Greek & Roman Worlds: A New Perspective, ed. O. Taplin (Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 58-87, 133-155.

“Ancient Greek Board Games and How to Play Them,” Classical Philology 94 (1999): 247-267.

“The Cultural Impact of (on) Democracy: Decentering Tragedy,” in Democracy 2500: Questions and Challenges, ed. I. Morris and K. Raaflaub (Archaeological Institute of America, Conference and Colloquia Papers, 1997), pp. 155–69.

“Inventing the Hetaira: Sex, Politics, and Discursive Conflict in Archaic Greece,” Classical Antiquity 16 (1997): 106–150.

“Pindar and the Prostitutes, or Reading Ancient ‘Pornography’,” Arion (3rd series) 4, no. 2 (1996): 49–75; reprinted in Constructions of the Classical Body, ed. J. Porter (University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 101–25.

“Herodotus and the Language of Metals,” Helios 22 (1995): 36–64.

“Pudenda Asiae Minoris” (with Andrew Garrett), Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 96 (1994): 75–83.

“Crisis and Decorum in Sixth–Century Lesbos: Reading Alkaios Otherwise,” Quaderni Urbinati di cultura classica, N.S. 47 (1994): 67–92.

“Introduction” (with Carol Dougherty), in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 1–13.

“The Economy of Kudos,” in Cultural Poetics in Archaic Greece: Cult, Performance, Politics, ed. C. Dougherty and L. Kurke (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 131–63.

“The Politics of ἁβροσύνη in Archaic Greece,” Classical Antiquity 11 (1992): 91–120.

“Fathers and Sons: A Note on Pindaric Ambiguity,” American Journal of Philology 112 (1991): 287–300.

“Pindar’s Sixth Pythian and the Tradition of Advice Poetry,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 120 (1990): 85–107.

“ΚΑΠΗΛΕΙΑ and Deceit: Theognis 59–60,” American Journal of Philology 110 (1989): 535–44.

“Pouring Prayers: A Formula of Indo–European Sacral Poetry?,” Journal of Indo–European Studies 17 (1989): 113–25.

“The Poet’s Pentathlon: Genre in Pindar’s First Isthmian,” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 29 (1988): 97–113.