Stephanie Nelson

I received my BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, the only school in the country, I tell my students, where Ancient Greek is required. That may not be strictly accurate, but I’m sure it’s the only school where Ptolemy’s Almagest is required reading. I then received my MA and PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, branding me forever as a “Great Books” sort of person and destining me for the Core. My first book, God and the Land: the Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil was published by Oxford University Press and my various articles range from a study of Hesiod’s treatment of farming, to a look at T. E. Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey, to pieces on Aristophanes, Joyce’s Ulysses, Shelley’s translation of the Symposium, and translation generally, in a piece on the role of translation in the 20th c. written for The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 5. My most recent book is entitled Aristophanes’ Tragic Muse: tragedy, comedy, and the polis in Classical Athens. What draws all these together, I suppose, is my interest in the way one author, culture, genre or translator appropriates another, transforming, distorting, and in a way repudiating the original, but also acknowledging a deep and even formative debt to it. So, I think, Virgil to Hesiod, Greek comedy to tragedy, and James Joyce to Homer. My recent work has been primarily on the relation of Ulysses to the Odyssey, which is, surprisingly, very little studied, perhaps due to an unfortunate comment of Ezra Pound’s that the Odyssey is merely “scaffolding” for Joyce. Pound was a great poet, but there were other things he was wrong about, and I think he’s wrong about this too. If I ever get a sabbatical I hope to write a book about it.

I now spell “Virgil” with an “i”.

My research interests include: Greek and Roman epic, Hesiod, Greek comedy and tragedy, intertextuality, translation, and Classical reception, particularly Joyce.

Publications

Hesiod’s Works and Days, translation with commentary, Focus Press, 2008.

Review of Charles Platter, Aristophanes and the Carnival of Genres, Arion, 3.15.3, 2008, 157-64.

Review of Glenn Most, Hesiod, Loeb Classical Library, New England Classical Journal, 35.2, 2008.

Review of Richard Hunter, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions, The Classical Outlook, 85.2, 2008.

“Shelley and Plato’s Symposium: The Poet’s Revenge,” International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 14.1/2, 2007, 100-29.

“Cinematographic Joyce:” Joyce Workshop, 2006,” James Joyce Literary Supplement, 21.1, May, 2007.

“Hesiod” in The Blackwell Companion to Ancient Epic, ed. John Miles Foley, 2005.

Review of Anthony Edwards, Hesiod’s Ascra, New England Classical Journal, Feb., 2005.

Review of Jenny Strauss Clay, Hesiod’s Cosmos, Hermathena, 2005.

Review of Maria Marsilio, Farming and Poetry in Hesiod’s Works and Days, Journal of the Institute for the Classical Tradition, Fall, 2003.

“Lawrence’s Prose Odyssey: A “Prosaic” Approach to Greatness” with Maren Cohn, in The Waking Dream of T. E. Lawrence: Essays on His Life, Literature, and Legacy, ed. Charles Stang (New York: Palgrave, 2002).

“Full Circle: The Inherent Tension in Ethics from Plato to Plato” in Instilling Ethics, ed. Norma Thompson (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000).

God and the Land: The Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

“The Justice of Zeus in Hesiod’s Fable of the Hawk and the Nightingale”, The Classical Journal 92 (1997) 235-247.

“Justice and Farming in the Works and Days”in The Greeks and Us: Essays in Honor of Arthur Adkins ed. Robert B. Louden and Paul Scholimeier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

“The Drama of Hesiod’s Farm” Classical Philology 91(1996) 45-53.

“Calypso’s Choice: Immortality and Heroic Striving in the Odyssey and Ulysses” in Literary Imagination, Ancient and Modern ed. Todd Breyfogle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).