Who We Are

Staff

Barbara Graziosi

Barbara Graziosi is Principal Investigator of Living Poets: A New Approach to Ancient Poetry. She is Professor of Classics at Durham University, and Director – for the Arts and Humanities – of the Institute of Advanced Study. She is the author of Inventing Homer: The Early Reception of Epic (Cambridge, 2002), and co-author with Johannes Haubold of Homer: The Resonance of Epic (London, 2005) and Iliad 6: A Commentary (Cambridge, 2010). Together with Emily Greenwood she edited Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (Oxford, 2005); and, together with G. R. Boys-Stones and P. Vasunia, she edited The Oxford Handbook of Hellenic Studies (Oxford, 2009). Her latest book, The Gods of Olympus: A History, will appear in 2013 (in British, American, German, Dutch and Italian editions). She regularly reviews for The Times Higher Education Supplement, and writes for the London Review of Books.

Sarah Burges Watson

Sarah Burges Watson (Research Fellow in Greek Literature) studied singing and piano at the Royal Academy of Music and Classics at Cambridge (BA Hons), the University of Pennsylvania (MA, Thouron Scholar), and Harvard (PhD 2009). She has taught at McGill University (2009-10) and the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin (2010-12). Her research explores the way in which representations of the mythical singer Orpheus interact with his identity as an author of mystical texts. She has written three articles: ‘Muses of Lesbos or Aeschylean Muses of Pieria: Orpheus’ Head on a Fifth-Century Hydria’ (forthcoming GRBS September 2013); ‘Orpheus’ Erotic Mysteries: Plato, Pederasty, and the Zagreus Myth in Phanocles fr. 1’ (under consideration); and ‘Mousikê and Mysteries: Dionysos and Orpheus in Aeschylus’ Bassarai’ (submitted). Her monograph will explore traditions about Orpheus through the lens of a Late Antique miniature epic, the Orphic Argonautica, whose author claims to be Orpheus himself, presenting an episode of his mythical autobiography in an ‘Orphic’ mode.

Nora Goldschmidt

Nora Goldschmidt is Research Fellow in Latin Literature and its Reception and, from October 2013, will hold a lectureship in Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She holds degrees in English and Classics from UCL and Magdalen College, Oxford, and has strong interests in Latin poetry and classical reception: her article on Ennius’ post-textual reception in the Renaissance is available in Classical Receptions Journal 4.1 (2012), 1−19, and her monograph Shaggy Crowns: Ennius’ Annales and Virgil’s Aeneid is forthcoming in the Oxford Classical Monographs series. Her current project, Lives and Afterlives of the Roman Poets, examines the biographical receptions of the Roman poets from antiquity to modernity. Rather than see poetic biography as a species of history, the book will treat biography as a creative mode of reading ancient texts, explored through a series of case studies from the thirteenth-century De vetula, a pseudo-autobiography written in Ovid’s voice, to the modern ‘death of the author’ in Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (1945).

Nick White

Nick White is the IT research consultant for the Living Poets project. His background is in the social sciences, holding a BA and MA in Anthropology from the Universities of Lampeter and Sussex respectively. Since then he has done a variety of web development and system administration jobs. He has been involved in the free and open source software community for some years, regularly contributing code to a wide variety of different projects, and maintaining several. Since joining Living Poets he has started to learn Ancient Greek, developed Optical Character Recognition for the language, and published an article about training the Tesseract OCR program to recognise Ancient Greek in Eutypon 28-29 (2012).

Erika Taretto

Erika Taretto is a doctoral research student at Durham University, and holds BA and MA degrees in Classics from the University of Turin. Her doctoral dissertation, Poets and Places of Ancient Greece, focuses on a selection of sites linked to the biographies of the ancient Greek poets, such as Thebes (Pindar), Paros (Archilochos), and Alexandria (Homer). Since antiquity poetic landscapes have played a central role in shaping the relationship between poets and their admirers. Erika collects and analyses evidence for the cult of poets, and for (pseudo-)biographical stories involving poets in specific landscapes. The aim of her research is to investigate the role of landscape in the formation and transmission of the biographical poetic traditions.

William Wallis

William Wallis is a doctoral research student at Durham University. He studied Classics at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and graduated with a first-class BA in 2011. William is interested primarily in ancient sculpture and its reception and re-use from antiquity to the present day. His doctoral dissertation, Looking at Portraits, Reading Biographies: The Relationship between Lives and Images, focuses on how ancient portraiture was related to the biography and re-imagination of its subjects, on how this relationship between representation and biography changed over time in the classical world, and on how it has affected the modern study of iconography since the Renaissance. This has led to a particular interest in the collections and publications of Fulvio Orsini, whose work is fundamental both for the reception of ancient portraiture and for the development of modern iconography.

Senior Collaborators

• Dr. Peter Heslin
• Prof. Andrew Laird
• Prof. Verity Platt
• Dr. Divya Tolia-Kelly

Editorial Board

• Prof. Barbara Graziosi
• Prof. Andrew Laird
• Prof. Verity Platt

Research Assistants

Paola Bassino

Paola Bassino is a doctoral research student at Durham University. She studied at the University of Turin and graduated with MA dissertation on the Lives of Homer. For her PhD she is preparing a critical edition and commentary on the Certamen Homeri et Hesiodi. Paola’s approach to ancient biographical texts combines the resources of textual criticism with the methodologies of reception studies: different versions of the same biographical anecdote and textual variants in the manuscripts of the same text are considered as a means of presenting specific images of the poets and their works. She has written an article on the textual transmission of the Certamen (ZPE 180) and one on the epic poet Lesches (forthcoming on Classics@, the online journal of the Centre for Hellenic Studies, Harvard).