简介

Karen Bassi received her BA in Classics from UCSC in 1980 and her Ph.D. in Classics from Brown University in 1987. She has taught at UCSC since 1989 where she is Professor of Classics and Literature. She served as chair of the Literature Department (2008-2012), as Director of the Classics Program, and as director of the EAP Program in the Netherlands. She has also served as Chair of the Senate Committee on Faculty Welfare, as Senior Co-Chair of the Women's Classical Caucus of the American Philological Association, and on the editorial board of Classical Antiquity. She is currently the Greek editor for the American Journal of Philology (beginning July 1, 2014) and is serving a three-year term on the Program Committee of the American Philological Association. Her principal areas of research and teaching are ancient Greek literature and historiography. In addition to articles on a wide variety of topics in ancient Greek literature and history, she is the author of Acting Like Men, Gender, Drama and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece (University of Michigan Press, 1998) and co-editor, with Peter Euben, of When Worlds Elide: Classics, Politics, Culture (Rowman and Littlefield, 2010). She has recently completed a book titled Traces of the Past: Classics Between History and Archaeology (forthcoming from the University of Michigan Press). The book is a study of visual perception as a source of knowledge about the past in ancient Greek epic, history, and drama. It explores how the visual experiences of characters and narrators in these genres provide insight into the process of accessing and giving meaning to the past. The book is aimed at opening up a dialogue between Classicists who study texts (philologists and historians) and those who study material or visual sources (archaeologists). It also engages with topics of general importance for humanities research; the dominance of vision in making truth claims, the role of language in distinguishing fiction from fact, and the criteria for establishing the reality of the past. Her current research focuses on the ways in which the fact of human mortality is a distinctive variable in ancient Greek literature and culture. She is the Principal Investigator for an NEH Institute on this topic in Athens in summer 2014 and for an interdisciplinary Residency Group at the University of California Humanities Research Institute in fall 2015.