Afroditi Angelopoulou

Greek literature and Poetics; Athenian Drama, Performance and Embodiment; Plato and the Senses; Aesthetics and Ethics

Originally from Greece, I received my BA and MA in Greek and Latin Literature from the University of Athens, and my PhD in Classics from the University of Southern California. I returned to USC after teaching at Dartmouth College for two years. My first book, The Body and the Senses in Greek Tragedy (OUP), traces the role of embodiment accross a range of Greek tragic plays, aiming to show how tragic perfomances can communicate affective, ethical, as well as philosophical meaning not only intellectually, but also viscerally. I suggest that such an embodied approach can open up a fruitful line of inquiry into how drama can be experienced in live performance, but also through a text. These concerns also inform a recent chapter on Euripides’ Hecuba, which explores the ethical implications of embodied spectatorship in tragedy.

I have also written on sensory experience and aesthetic judgment in Plato and Aristophanes, as well as on the intersections of affect and gender in the Athenian theater. More recently, I have become interested in questions of happiness and unhappiness in Greek tragedy, and in their aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions. A recent article offers a comparative reading of Euripides’ Medea and Alexandros Papadiamantis’ The Murderess as “unhappy archives,” drawing on the work of Sara Ahmed.

• Ph.D. Classics, University of Southern California, 2017
• B.A. Philology, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
• M.A. Ancient Greek and Latin Literature, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens