HUMS 405, Interpretations - The Parthenon

Professor Milette Gaifman

Milette Gaifman received her B.A. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1997, and her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2005. Before coming to Yale in September 2005, she was Hanadiv Fellow and Lecturer in Classical Art and Archaeology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 2004–2005.

Her research focuses on the intersection between Greek art and visual culture and Greek religious life. She is interested in topics such as the divine image in Greek religion, the relationship between art and ritual, the variety of forms in Greek art—from the naturalistic to the non-figural—as well as the historiography of the scholarship of Greek art. Her first book Aniconism in Greek Antiquity (Oxford University Press, 2012) examines the cultic and visual significance of non-figural monuments that marked the presence of gods in Greek antiquity. Her forthcoming book The Art of Libation in Classical Athens (Under Contract, Yale University Press) examines the affective force of images of libations in Athenian art of the fifth century BC.

In 2007 she was awarded the Jane Faggen Dissertation Prize from Princeton University’s Department of Art and Archaeology, in 2008-2009 she was a visiting scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 2009 she received the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Publication from Yale College. In April 2013, she received the Gaddis Smith International Book prize for her book, Aniconism in Greek Antiquity, an award given by the MacMillan Center for the best first book on an international subject by a member of the Yale faculty. She served as Director of Undergraduate Studies at the Department of History of Art in 2009-2011.

Professor Emily Greenwood

Emily Greenwood studied Classics at Cambridge University, where she gained her BA, MPhil, and PhD degrees. After finishing her PhD she was a research fellow at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge (2000–2002), before joining the department of Classics at the University of St Andrews where she was lecturer in Greek from 2002–2008. She joined the Classics department at Yale in July 2009. She has a secondary appointment in the Department of African-American Studies.

Her research interests include ancient Greek historiography, Greek prose literature of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, twentieth century classical receptions (especially uses of Classics in Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and Greece), Classics and Postcolonialism, and the theory and practice of translating the ‘classics’ of Greek and Roman literature. She is more than happy to talk to students who are interested in working in any of these areas.