Kate Gilhuly
Professor of Classical Studies
Interests include gender, sexuality, and the erotics of place and time in the ancient world, as well as using Classics to foster interdisciplinary discussion. */
I teach ancient Greek, ancient literature in translation, and occasionally Latin. In the classroom, I try to instill an enduring and independent interest in Classics in my students, to inspire engagement in critical analysis, and to model a standard of rigorous discipline. While I realize that not all students will want to pursue Classics extensively, I hope to suggest to them the range of learning available in this field, demonstrating the array of disciplines that classical scholarship informs and enhances—literature, philosophy, history, medicine and archaeology. I feel most successful when students tell me that their exposure to Classics taught them to think differently.
My research interests are sex and gender in Greek literature. In my first book, The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens, and in various articles I have written, I examine the way that literary depictions of sex and gender provide insight into larger issues, revealing cultural, political, and economic dynamics. For the ancient Greeks, gender represented an elemental notion of hierarchy, yet this dynamic was fraught with anxiety, nuance, complication. As such, gender was a useful representational scheme for delicate negotiations of power in a variety of arenas. I do not seek to reconstruct the real life experiences of men and women in antiquity, but rather to understand how gender operates in the collective imagination, and then to determine the relationship of this discourse to lived experience.
In Erotic Geographies in Ancient Greek Literature and Culture, I explore the relationship of discourses about sex and place in the Classical Athenian Imagination. In this project, I o think about how a place gets a reputation. I examine passages where various sexual behaviors are given geographical and cultural parameters, examining how and why Athenians linked certain sexual practices to a particular ethnicity, or place. I focus on the sexual reputations of Sparta, Lesbos and Corinth in particular, since these regions seem to have attained especially strong symbolic associations with very particular sexual cultures. In my latest research, I turn to focus on the link between sex and time, with a collection of essays coedited with Jeffrey Ulrich in the works, as well as a book length manuscript under construction.
Education
- B.A., Wesleyan University
- M.A., University of California-Berkeley
- Ph.D., University of California-Berkeley
Current and upcoming courses
Beginning Greek 2
GRK102
Greek 102 builds on what you learned in Greek 101 in the fall (see the description of Greek 101 for details) and completes your introduction to the ancient Greek language. In the last month or so, we’ll turn from the textbook to reading excerpts from actual Greek authors like Lysias, Euripides and Sappho. Steady review throughout the term will reinforce what you learned in the fall at the same time you’re learning new material. A single year can take you from knowing no Greek at all to being able to read texts that shaped the western literary, philosophical, and political traditions. Studying Greek will also strengthen your English vocabulary, improve your command of English grammar, and enhance your writing skills.
-
Intermediate Greek 2: Homer
GRK202
Study of selected books in Greek from Homer's Iliad or Odyssey with emphasis on the oral style of early epic; further reading in Homer in translation; the historical background of the period.