Alyson Melzer

Alyson Melzer

Assistant Professor, Classical Studies

Education

  • B.A., Occidental College, 2011
  • Post-Baccalaureate, University of California Los Angeles, 2014
  • Ph.D., Stanford University, 2020

Research Areas

  • Ancient Greek Literature and Culture
  • Greco-Roman Literary Criticism
  • 5th-Century Greek Theater
  • Music, Performance, and Aesthetics

About Alyson Melzer

I am a scholar and teacher of the ancient Greek world, with research focused on the history and development of ancient Greek literary culture. While many authors and time periods are important to this conversation, from Homer to Plato to Plutarch, my work highlights the significant contributions literary criticism offers to our understanding of how ancient Greek peoples studied and experienced their own literary traditions. An enduring interest in music, pedagogy, and aesthetics led me to study the reception of Archaic and Classical poetry and performance practices in the treatises of such critics as Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Longinus, and Demetrius. My book project, entitled Spectacles of Style: Performance, Body, and Emulation in Greek Literary Criticism under Empire, explores the centrality of performance and the physical body to conceptualizations of literary language and style in antiquity. I am writing elsewhere about the reception of Sappho’s lyric poetry in criticism, the socio-political critiques Lucian makes through pantomime in On Dance, and Philostratus' the Younger's engagement with tragedy in his Imagines. Fifth-century Athenian theater, with an emphasis on its soundscapes and performance realities, is also an ongoing area of my research and teaching related to my larger interests in sensory stimulation and  experiences of verbal art.

Courses Taught

  • Ancient Greek Culture
  • Greek Language (beginning, intermediate, and advanced)
  • Ancient Greek Theater in Translation
  • Ancient Greece and Rome in Modern Movies

Selected Publications

“Dances of Style and Cultures of Movement in the Literary Criticism of Longinus and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.”  TAPA (2024) 154.2: 397-435.

“Sappho and the Sensorium in Greek Literary Criticism,” in Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Sappho, ed. V. Kousoulini et al. Brill. (Forthcoming)

“Comic Echopoetics in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousai.” American Journal of Philology. (2022)