Sawyer Advisory Committee

Kathryn Bosher (PhD University of Michigan), Principal Investigator, k-bosher@northwestern.edu

Kathryn Bosher is an assistant professor of Classics.  Her research interests are the social context, the production, and the reception of ancient theatre, both in the classical world and in later periods. Her publications include articles on the reception of Aeschylus in Euripides and on staging ancient drama in modern university settings.  Her book project is a history of early Greek theatre in Sicily. At Northwestern, she is an affiliate of the Classical Traditions Initiative and a member of the associate faculty of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Theatre and Drama.  She is also a member of the steering committee of the American Philological Association’s Committee for Ancient and Modern Performance.

Tracy Davis (PhD University of Warwick)

is Barber Professor of the Performing Arts at Northwestern University, where she directs the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Theatre and Drama and teaches in the English and Theatre departments. Her books include Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 1991), George Bernard Shaw and the Socialist Theatre (Greenwood Press, 1994), and The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge University Press, 2000). She is also co-editor (with Ellen Donkin) of the collections Women and Playwriting in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge University Press, 1999) and (with Thomas Postlewait) Theatricality (Cambridge University Press, 2004).  Professor Davis serves as President of the American Society for Theatre Research.

Reginald Gibbons (PhD Stanford University)

is a prize-winning poet, fiction writer, translator literary critic, artist, and Professor of English and Classics. In 2008 he will publish a new book of poems, Creatures of a Day (LSU) and a new book of translations, Selected Poems of Sophocles (Princeton).  From 1981 to 1997, Gibbons served as the editor of TriQuarterly magazine, an international journal of new writing, art and cultural inquiry published at Northwestern.  Gibbons has translated Selected Poems of Luis Cernuda (California, 1977; reprint Sheep Meadow Press, 1999); Guillén on Guillén: The Poetry and the Poet (with A. L. Geist; Princeton, 1979); Euripides' Bakkhai (Oxford Univ. Press, 2001) and Sophokles' Antigone (Oxford, 2003), both of the latter with Charles Segal.  His current projects include a work on 20th century and contemporary Russian poetry, co-authored with Ilya Kutik, including essays and translations, and a book of essays on poetry.

Marianne Hopman (PhD, Harvard University/University of Paris-IV Sorbonne)

is an assistant professor of Classics and Comparative Literary Studies. She specializes in ancient Greek poetry and mythology. Her publications include articles on the Orphic Hymns, Juvenal's Satires, and the figure of Niobe in Sophocles. She is currently working on articles on Euripides' Medea and Aeschylus' Persians, and on a book that explores the development of the semantics attached to the sea-monster Scylla in Greek and Roman cultures. She is an affiliate of the Classical Traditions Initiative and French Interdisciplinary Group.

Richard Kraut (PhD, Princeton University)

is Charles and Emma Morrison Professor in the Humanities. His principal research interests are the moral and political thought of Plato and Aristotle, and he frequently teaches courses on these topics. He joined the Northwestern faculty in 1995, having previously taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Among his publications are Socrates and the State (Princeton University Press, 1984), Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton University Press, 1989), Aristotle Politics Books VII and VIII, translation with commentary (Clarendon Press, 1997), and Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2002). He edited The Cambridge Companion to Plato The (1992), Critical Essays on Plato's Republic (Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), and The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (2006). His most recent book, What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being, was published by Harvard University Press in April 2007. With Steven Skultety, he co-edited Aristotle's Politics: Critical Essays (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).  In 2006 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is an affiliate of the Classical Traditions Initiative.

Sara Monoson (PhD, Princeton University)

is the author of Plato's Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2000), which was awarded the 2001 American Political Science Association's Foundations Book Prize for Best First Book in Political Theory. She has also written articles on Athenian democratic thought, Thucydides, and international relations theory. Her current project examines creative appropriations of Socrates in post-war American popular media. She has been a fellow in Northwestern's Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities. Monoson is director of the Classical Traditions Initiative.

John Wynne (PhD, Cornell University)

John Wynne has interests in ancient philosophy and in Latin literature. He has concentrated on philosophy in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, writing on Cicero's dialogues On the Nature of the Gods, On Divination, and On Fate. He also maintains interests in the art of technical writing in antiquity--the dialogue and didactic poetry--and in ancient science. He is an affiliate of the Classical Traditions Initiative.