Deborah Boedeker
Professor of Classics:
Macfarlane House 203
Phone: +1 401 863 2993
Phone 2: +1 401 863 1267
Deborah_Boedeker@brown.edu
Her research and teaching interests include archaic and classical Greek religion, poetry, and historiography – and particularly the mutual influences and confluences of these aspects of ancient culture. In addition to publications on archaic poetry, Euripides, religious and mythical traditions, and Herodotus, she has edited and co-authored a number of volumes on topics in early Greek literature and culture.
Biography
Deborah Bodeker received a B.A. from Wellesley College (1966), and an M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1973) from St. Louis University. Her doctoral thesis, "Aphrodite's Entry into Greek Epic," was published in 1974. She was a Junior Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies, and taught at Georgetown University, Brooklyn College, Wellesley College, and the College of the Holy Cross before being appointed Professor of Classics at Brown in 1992.
From 1992-2000, she was on partial leave of absence from Brown while directing the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., together with Kurt Raaflaub. She became Chair of the Brown Classics Department in 2002, and was elected Vice President for Research of the American Philological Association for 2001-05.
Her research and teaching interests include archaic and classical Greek religion, poetry, and historiography-and particularly the mutual influences and confluences of these aspects of ancient culture. In addition to publications on archaic poetry, Euripides, religious and mythical traditions, and Herodotus, She has edited several collected volumes, most of them the result of conferences. These include:
Herodotus and the Invention of History. Arethusa, vol. 20 (1987)
The New Simonides (with David Sider). Arethusa, vol. 29.2 (1996)
The World of Troy: Homer, Schliemann, and the Treasures of Priam. Washington D.C., 1997; also published as a special issue of Classical World (1998)
The Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Real World. Washington D.C., 1998
Democracy, Empire, and the Arts in Fifth-Century Athens (with Kurt A. Raaflaub). Center for Hellenic Studies Colloquium Series. Cambridge, Mass., 1998
The New Simonides: Contexts of Praise and Desire (with David Sider). Oxford, 2001
Some recent articles and chapters include:
"Herodotus' Genres," in Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, Society, edd. Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink (Cambridge, Mass. 2000), 97-114
"Epic Heritage and Mythical Patterns in Herodotus," in Brill's Companion to Herodotus, edd. Egbert J. Bakker, Irene J. F. de Jong, and Hans van Wees (Leiden 2002), 97-116.
"Pedestrian Fatalities: The Prosaics of Death in Herodotus," in Herodotus and His World. edd. Peter Derow and Robert Parker (Oxford 2003), pp. 17-36.
"Drinking from the Sources: John Barton's Tantalus and the Epic Cycle," in Gestures: Essays in Ancient History, Literature, and Philosophy presented to Alan L. Boegehold, edd. Geoffrey Bakewell and James Sickinger (Oxford 2003) pp. 27-39.
"Homer's Virgil and the Games for Anchises," in O Qui Complexus et Gaudia Quanta Fuerunt (Festschrift for M. C. J. Putnam), edd. Joseph Pucci and Jeri DeBrohun (Providence 2003), pp. 17-37.
"Athenian Religion in the Age of Pericles," forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to the Age of Pericles, ed. L. J. Samons
"Tragedy and City," co-authored with Kurt A. Raaflaub, in the Blackwell Companion to Tragedy, ed. Rebecca Bushnell (Oxford 2005), 109-127
"The View from Eleusis: Demeter in the Persian Wars," forthcoming in Persian War Tradition, edd. Edith Hall, P.J. Rhodes (Oxford 2006)
"Sappho Old and New," forthcoming in Archaic Lesbos: Sappho, Alcaeus, Pittacus, ed. Apostolos Pierris (Oxbow 2006)
"Greek Gods in Home and Hearth?" forthcoming in Household and Family Religion: Comparative Perspectives, edd. John Bodel, Saul Olyan (Blackwell, Oxford 2007)
She is married to Kurt Raaflaub and has two grown children. In addition to her work, she enjoys hiking, cooking for friends, music, and travel to semi-exotic places.
Interests
She is currently working on several topics in ancient Greek literature, history, and religion. One project is an overview of domestic religious practices (as opposed to the civic cults that are far more common subjects of investigation): prayers, offerings, imprecations, healing and fertility rites that were part of everyday life in a Greek household. She found these practices intersected with larger-scale civic cults in variety of ways, from competition to complementarity. In particular, household practices included areas of life that were excluded from public sanctuaries: birth, sexuality, and death. In trying to understand religion in ancient Greece, it is essential to consider the dynamic relationship between domestic and civic rites.
A concurrent project focuses on a recently discovered fragment of the poorly preserved but fascinating poetic corpus of Sappho, who was so much admired in her own time that she was known as the "tenth Muse." The papyrus on which these lines were written is one of our very earliest manuscripts of ancient Greek literature. It includes a reflection on old age, which the speaker (Sappho herself?) squarely faces as inevitable for humans. Even Tithonus, the lover of the Dawn goddess and immortalized by her, grew old. The papyrus contains other poetic fragments as well; I argue that its contents raise fundamental questions about the transmission or publication of Sappho's songs in antiquity and their transformation into a corpus of written poems.
For some time, she has been writing on the traditions that emerged concerning the defeat of the great Persian invasion of mainland Greece in the early 5th century BCE, generally conceded to be a major turning point in history. The events of this period inspired the first great work of historiography in the West, Histories of Herodotus, with its fascinating blend of oral history, analysis, and subtle patterning. Battles in the Persian Wars were also praised, and those who died in them were lamented, in highly poetic accounts, almost as if they were on a par with the legendary Trojan War of the distant past. Rituals emerged to commemorate the war dead in various Greek city-states, and battle sites like Marathon or Plataea became 'places of memory,' linked for many centuries with the defining events that happened there. Commemoration, however, takes many forms; currently she is working on Greek accounts, in prose and poetry, that find fault with some of the heroes of the Persian Wars, especially the brilliant Athenian strategist Themistocles.
Degrees
B.A. Wellesley College (1966), M.A. (1967) and Ph.D. (1973) , St. Louis University
Awards
Affiliations
American Philological Association (Vice President for Research, 2001-2005)
American Institute of Archaeology
Classical Association of New England
Funded Research
N/A
Curriculum Vitae
