Amanda Kubic

“Animating Antiquity: Classical (Dis)embodiments by Modern Women”

My dissertation project, "Animating Antiquity," is an intervention in Critical Classical Reception Studies, in so far as I draw on the theories and methods of Disability Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies to think about how modern classicism has been complicit in maintaining and perpetuating structures of systemic inequality. My dissertation explores the animation of classical antiquity in and by twentieth- and twenty-first-century women’s poetry and performing bodies, in order to challenge typical conceptions of the “classical” body and to show how these artists open up new possibilities for embodiment in the present and future that do not assume a normative shape or coherent organic whole. By claiming Greco-Roman antiquity’s vibrancy, constant liveliness and enlivening power, and ability to affect and be affected by those drawn to it, my work recognizes how modern women simultaneously animate that past through a variety of media and are animated by it. I argue that animacy can also be a means of destabilizing hierarchies between the human and non-human, between ancient pasts and objects we assume to be static and dead and those living millenia later who seek to interact with, translate, appropriate, and impose meaning on them. In this comparative project, I analyze modernist and postmodern works by women in poetry and dance, in English and modern Greek, demonstrating how they perform fragmented, choral, metamorphosing, and phantom aspects of the Greco-Roman corpus. Combining my reading of ancient Greek and Latin with research in modern poetry and performance archives, I illuminate the tensions and continuities that exist between modern Greek and Anglo-American receptions of antiquity.

Amanda Kubic is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature.