At RU on Thurs 10 Oct 13, Barnard’s Nancy Worman addresses landscape aesthetics in ancient literature

Nicolas Pouissin’s Blind Orion Searching for the Rising Sun (1658). Credit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Here at Rutgers Classics, Thursday 10 October (5 PM) marks the first public lecture of the Fall 2013 term.  Ruth Adams Building (room 003) is the venue, on Rutgers’ leafy Douglass Campus in New Brunswick. And the host is the Department’s ever-active Graduate Student Association. The speaker? Nancy Worman, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature in Barnard College and Columbia University. Professor Worman will present on “Dreams of Order: Landscape Aesthetics in Ancient Poetry and Literary Theory”.

Indeed, Nancy Worman is currently completing a book on stylistic landscapes in ancient literary theory and criticism, to be published by Cambridge University Press. It is a study of the development of stylistic metaphors in ancient literary theory and criticism, as they are embodied and activated in the concrete spaces of the ancient city and surrounding countryside. And with Joy Connolly (New York University) she is editing the Oxford Handbook of Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism.

Professor Worman is the author of a number of articles and books on style, performance, and the body in Greek literature and culture (including drama and oratory). Nancy Worman’s works include The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature (Texas, 2002), and Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 2008). The latter is an especially scintillating study of the language of insult in classical Athens, from its roots in early epic down through the fourth century BCE.

Nancy Worman received the degrees of AB from Barnard and MA and PhD from Princeton, and  taught as an Instructor at Rutgers and Yale, before joining the faculty of Barnard in 1996. She was a Visiting Associate Professor at Harvard in 2007/8. Worman’s interests extend also to the reception of ancient literature and culture, particularly in Romantic poetry and the Modernist novel. A new project is called “Tragic Bodies,” which aims to explore the aesthetics of embodiment in Greek tragedy and beyond.

RU graduate students David Wright and Isaiah Clough are organizing this event for the Classics Graduate Student Association. You can see the GSA’s future events for this term  (17 October, 14 November) here.