Deborah Roberts

Biography

I graduated from Swarthmore college in 1971, with a major in Greek; I earned my M.A. in Classics at Stanford and my Ph.D. in Classics at Yale. My academic background might make it look as if I had dedicated myself to this field from an early age, especially since I began both Latin and Greek in secondary school. In fact, however, it was some years before I felt at home as a classicist. I majored in Greek, but minored in Psychology. I went to graduate school in Classics, but took courses in Linguistics and Comparative Literature. It wasn’t until I came to Haverford and started actually teaching that I realized that for all my doubts and my diverging interests I had ended up doing just what I loved best: talking with other people – both colleagues and students -- about books and how we read them, and teaching the languages that further open up the world of books.

I teach in both the department of Classics and the program in Comparative Literature, and this is a happy combination for me: I think of myself as a student and teacher of language and literature who has a particular but not exclusive interest in Greek and Latin texts and their afterlife. I teach Greek and Latin from the elementary level through advanced literature courses; I also teach courses that are comparative in nature and look beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the later literary tradition, exploring (for example) the history of literary theory, the development of the conception of the tragic, the varieties of intertextual relationship between Greco-Roman literature and other literatures, and the theory and practice of translation. I also teach Haverford’s only course on children’s literature.

Education

B.A., Swarthmore College

M.A., Stanford University

Ph.D., Yale University

Research

My earlier research was concerned largely with Greek tragedy, and especially with the ways in which plays tell their stories and how they achieve (or complicate, or undercut) a sense of closure at the end. This interest led to my co-editing (with Francis Dunn and Don Fowler) a collection of essays, Classical Closure: Reading the End in Greek and Latin Literature (Princeton 1999). More recently, I’ve been working on aspects of the reception and translation of ancient literature in the twentieth century. I am currently collaborating with Sheila Murnaghan (University of Pennsylvania) on a book about childhood and the reception of Classics and am investigating the translation into English of obscenity in Greek and Latin literature; I am also completing a translation of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound. Recent and forthcoming publications include: “Water-Jug and Plover’s Feather: Rudyard Kipling’s India in Rosemary Sutcliff’s Roman Britain,” forthcoming in Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, special issue on “India, Greece, and Rome, 1757-2007”, E. Hall and P. Vasunia, eds; “From Fairy Tale to Cartoon: Collections of Greek Myth for Children,” special issue on “The Reception of Classical Mythology in Modern Handbooks and Collections,” Classical Bulletin 84 (2009) 58-73; “Translation and the ‘Surreptitious Classic’: Obscenity and Translatability,” in A. Lianeri and V. Zajko, eds, Translation and ‘The Classic’ Oxford University Press 2008; “Reconstructed Pasts: Rome and Britain, Child and Adult in Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill and Sutcliff’s Novels of Roman Britain,” in C. Stray, ed., Remaking the Classics (London: Duckworth 2007); “Translating Antiquity: Intertextuality, Anachronism, and Archaism,” in S. J. Heyworth, ed., with P.G. Fowler and S. J. Harrison, Classical Constructions: Papers in Memory of Don Fowler, Classicist and Epicurean (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 258-80.

Courses: Fall 2012, Haverford

Courses: Spring 2013, Haverford