Deborah Roberts

Biography

My academic background might make it look as if I had dedicated myself to this field from an early age, since I began both Latin and Greek in secondary school. In fact, however, it was some years before I made up my mind to be 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, since I am very much interested not only in ancient literature but in its afterlife – that is, the way in which it has been read and translated and imitated in later years and other cultures. I teach Greek and Latin at all levels, and like doing so at every one of these levels; even after more than 25 years I still feel the excitement of introducing the languages to a new group of students, and there are at the same time few things more enjoyable than reading the Odyssey or Oedipus the King (or Petronius or Ovid) with more advanced classes. But I also teach courses that are comparative in nature, and look beyond ancient Greece and Rome to the later western tradition, exploring (for example) the history of literary theory, the development of the conception of the tragic, and the various kinds of relationship between ancient literature and the later European tradition. (I also teach children’s literature in my spare time, but that’s another story.)

My courses are all based on discussion of the texts we’re reading. In elementary Greek and Latin, I bring in passages from ancient authors to read and talk about from the very beginning, and from the intermediate level on classes involve a combination of translation and critical discussion. In my courses in Classical Studies (cross-listed with Comparative Literature) I regularly ask students to take turns asking the opening question in class – so that everyone gets a chance to start our discussion, and so that I don’t always determine its direction. I enjoy collaborative work in general (I have team-taught several courses and am engaged in a collaborative research project with Sheila Murnaghan at the University of Pennsylvania), and I think of my classes as very much a collaboration with students.

Research

My own research was first concerned with Greek tragedy, and especially with the ways 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, and a few years ago I translated Euripides’ Ion for the Penn Greek Drama series (edited by D. Slavitt and P. Bovie). I teach segments on the theory and practice of translation in the Classics senior seminar and the introduction to Comparative Literature, and every few years I teach a course dedicated to this topic (Classical Studies/Comparative Literature 293: Translation/Transformation: Theory and Practice).

Courses: Fall 2007, Haverford

Courses: Spring 2008, Haverford