Congratulations to UW Classics PhD students Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld and Grace Funsten for winning awards for the best graduate student papers of 2021 from the Women’s Classical Caucus and the Lambda Classical Caucus, respectively!
WCC Best Pre-PhD Paper Award:
Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld, “While she was drunk, many others had sex with her. Reexamining Violence in Dem. 19.196-98 and [Dem.] 59.33-35,” presented at CAMWS 2021
Through careful close readings of two narratives, Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld’s paper combines philological rigor with innovative readings to shed light on the physical and sexual violence marginalized women could face in ancient Athens, and the actions they could take to escape. Their incisive examination powerfully reveals the different lived experiences of enslaved and manumitted women, and offers an important contribution to and extension of the study of ancient Greek women.
LCC Graduate Student Paper Award:
Grace Funsten, “The Mens and the Mentula: A Philosophical Reading of Maximianus’ Hymn to the Penis,” presented at SCS 2021
This paper offers a new reading of the hymn to the penis embedded in Maximianus’ fifth Elegy based on a series of puns on the words mens and mentula in the poem. Grace Funsten argues that these puns allow us to read the hymn to the mentula and its generative powers as a hymn to the Neoplatonic Intellect, or mens, as the source of all objects in the visible world.