Ella Haselswerdt

  • UCLA
  • Department of Classics
  • Assistant Professor

Ella Haselswerdt’s research interests range widely within the field of Greek literature, with special focus on choral expression in Greek tragedy.  She is currently working on a book project that uses the tragic chorus itself as a methodological model, one that combines a philological approach to Greek tragedy with a recognition that the accretions of modernity are inextricable from the original text.  Another ongoing project explores the relationship between trauma and narrative in Greek mythic production, collating stories about specific mythic figures as they are presented in texts canonical (drama, epic, historiography, Hellenistic poetry) as well as fragmentary and peripheral (the Epic Cycle, ‘wild papyri,’ obscure testimonia, fragmentary tragedy, scholarly marginalia, epigraphic evidence, later moments of reception), determining the mechanisms of these variations by using and adapting the tools of narrative theory alongside contemporary affect and trauma theory.  Other areas of interest include dream interpretation in Greco-Roman medical texts and queer modalities of ancient reception.