Periods: Ancient, 20th century
Languages: Greek, Latin, French, Hebrew
Research Interests: Ancient Greek Literature & Culture, gender; visual culture; Holocaust Studies
Froma I. Zeitlin was born in 1933, educated at Radcliffe-Harvard (BA 1954) and Columbia University (PhD 1970), retired from Princeton University in 2010 as the Charles Ewing Professor of Greek Language and Literature in the Department of Classics and Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature. Additionally, founder and director of the Program in Judaic Studies from 1996–2005. She is a specialist in Greek literature from Homer to Late Antiquity, with particular interests in epic, drama and prose fiction, along with work in gender criticism, as well as the relations between art and text in the context of the visual culture of antiquity. Some of her publications also include essays on Holocaust literature, a topic she has taught regularly for the department of Comparative Literature (and continues to do so). Her main work, however, consists of Under the Sign of the Shield: Semiotics and Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes (1982; 2d ed. 2009); Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature (1996); an assortment of edited or co-edited volumes: Before Sexuality: Structures of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (1990); Nothing to Do with Dionysos? Athenian Drama in its Social Context (1990); Love, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient Novel (2012), and numerous other essays. Some recent publications include “Sacrifices Holy and Unholy in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris” in Dans le laboratoire de l’historien de religions: Mélanges offerts à Philippe Borgeaud, eds. F. Prescendi and Y. Volokhine (Labor et Fides, Geneva 2011) 449-66; “Rereading Dionysos in the Theater” in Ein Different Gott? Dionysos and Ancient Polytheism, ed. Renate Schlesier (de Gruyter 2011), 536-51 and Plates LXVI –LXVII; “Gendered Ambiguities, Hybrid Formations, and the Imaginary of the Body in Achilles Tatius” in Narrating Desire: Eros, Sex, and Gender in the Ancient World, eds. M. Pinheiro, M. Skinner & F. I. Zeitlin (de Gruyter 2012) 113-34; “A Study in Form: Recognition Scenes in the Three Electra Plays,” Lexis 30 (2012) 361-78; “Figure: Ekphrasis,” Greece Rome 60 (2013) 17-31; “Landscapes and Portraits: Signs of the Uncanny and Illusions of the Real, “ in S. Panayotakis, et al, The Construction of the Real and the Ideal in the Ancient Novel, AN Suppl. (2013) 61-87. “Fictional Worlds and the Power of Myth in the Ancient Novel: The Case of Heliodorus’ Aethiopica,” in Théories et pratiques de la fiction à l’époque impériale, eds. C. Bréchet, A. Videau, and R. Webb (Picard 2013) 239-50.