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This talk will examine representations of Isis in various Roman literary texts. A female, Egyptian goddess, Isis provides a unique opportunity to probe the nexus of ethnicity and gender to gain insights into how Roman authors responded to, shaped, or understood these intersecting identities. The goddess emerges as able to inhabit simultaneously several ethnic categories (Greek, Egyptian, and Roman). As both a universal mother and a victimized other, she offers a sense of belonging to different individuals and groups in the Greco-Roman world from the first century BCE to the 2nd century CE.

Vassiliki Panoussi is Chancellor Professor and Chair of Classical Studies at William & Mary. She is the author of Vergil’s Aeneid and Greek Tragedy: Ritual, Empire, and Intertext (Cambridge 2009), Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women’s Rituals in Roman Literature (Johns Hopkins 2019), and co-editor of Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome: Representations and Reactions (Routledge 2020). Her work in progress includes a book on the Egyptian goddess Isis in Roman literature, a co-edited collection entitled, Ritual, Memory and Identity in Greece and Rome (De Gruyter), and another edited collection, tentatively entitled, Green Vergil: Eco-criticism and the Vergilian Tradition.

Sponsored by: Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies

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Latasha Simms, [[lsimms]]

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