FACULTY
Eleanor Winsor Leach
- Ruth N. Halls Professor, Department of Classical Studies
- Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Classical Studies
- Adjunct Professor, Department of Comparative Literature
Education
- A.B. at Bryn Mawr College, 1959
- M.A. at Yale University, 1960
- Ph.D. at Yale University, 1963
Research Interests
- Roman Painting
- Roman Sculpture
- Cicero’s and Pliny’s Letters
Contact Information
| leach@indiana.edu |
| Ballantine Hall, Room 569 |
| 855-4129 |
Background
The senior honors paper that I, as a fledgling “New Critic”, wrote on imagery in the Aeneid, marked the beginnings of my interest in using theory as an approach to reading Latin texts. Now at Indiana, many theorists later, I offer in alternate years a course entitled “Literary and Cultural Theory for Classicists” that serves as our proseminar for PhD students. Literary history as cultural history is the thematic orientation of the intensive survey of Latin Literature leading to the PhD exam in Latin Literature that I teach in alternate years. Much of my current work centers about the letters of Cicero and Pliny as focal points for matters of literary self-representation. Most recently my presidential address (2006) to the American Philological Association (TAPA 136.2) on Cicero’s correspondence with some of his younger protégés treats epistolary address with emphasis on the conceptualization of the addressee, but the Cicero chapters of a current book-in-progress center about letter exchanges with senatorial and equestrian peers during the periods of the first triumvirate and Caesar’s dictatorship. Visual art as self-representation is the complementary half of my interests. My contributions to our departmental curriculum in this area are a course in ancient painting, “Caves to Catacombs”, and a general survey of Roman Art and Archaeology. You can explore my ever-expanding photographic archive for this course by clicking the link on this page. Another link will show you my complete list of publications. A new project on which I began work in Spring 2004 involves the representation of statues in Roman literary texts. It’s a project about ekphrasis or description of art objects, but even more engaged with the social communication of such objects. Before this I had spent many summers’ study time in Rome and Campania working towards the book The Social Life of Painting in Ancient Rome and on the Bay of Naples (Cambridge University Press 2004), which contains many of my own descriptions of Pompeian houses and their paintings, but now that it is finished I still continue small research projects in Pompeii. During Summer 2008 I will be co-directing an NEH Summer Seminar for College and University Teachers entitled “Identity and Self-Representation in the Subcultures of Ancient Rome” at the American Academy in Rome in company with Professor Eve D’Ambra of the Vassar College Department of Art History.
Selected Awards
- M. Carey Thomas Senior Essay Prize, Bryn Mawr College
- John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship
- NEH Senior Fellowship
- ACLS/National Humanities Center Fellowships
- Fellowship, NGA Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts
Courses Recently Taught
- Ancient Painting: Caves to Catacombs
- Roman Art and Archaeology
- Cicero: His Life and Works
- Survey of Latin Literature for Graduate Students (2 semesters)
- Literary and Cultural Theory for Classicists
Publication Highlights
Books
Vergil's Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience. Ithaca, New York, 1974.
The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome. Princeton, 1988.
The Social Life of Painting in Ancient Rome and on the Bay of Naples. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Articles
"Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in Ovid's Metamorphoses," Ramus 3 (1974) 102-142.
"The Metamorphoses of the Myth of Acteon in Campanian Painting," Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts, Roemische Abteilung 88 (1981) 171-183 and pls. 131-141.
"The Anonymity of Romano-Campanian Painting and the Transition from the Second to the Third Style" in B. Gold, ed., Literary and Artistic Patronage in Augustan Rome (Austin, Texas, 1982) pp. 135-173.
"The Punishment of Dirce: A Newly Discovered Continuous Narrative Painting in the Casa di Giulio Polibio and its Significance within the Visual Tradition," Roemische Mitteilungen 93 (1986) 118-138 & color pl. 1; pls 49-59.
"The Politics of Self-Presentation: Pliny's Letters and Roman Portrait Sculpture," Classical Antiquity 9 (1990) 19-39.
"The Iconography of the Black Salone in the Casa di Fabio Rufo at Pompeii," Kölner Jahrbuch fur Vor-und Früh geschichte 24 (1991) 105-112.
"Polyphemus in a Landscape: Traditions of Pastoral Courtship," in John Dixon Hunt, ed. The Pastoral Landscape, National Gallery of Art, Studies in the History of Art 36, 1992, 63-88.
"Horace's Sabine Property in Lyric and Hexameter Verse," AJP 114 (1993) 271-302
"Absence and Desire in Cicero's De Amicitia," Classical World 87 (1993) 3-20.
"Oecus on Ibycus: Investigating the Vocabulary of the Roman House," in Space and Sequence in Ancient Pompeii, ed. Rick Jones and Sarah Bon, ed. Oxbow Books, Oxford, 1997, 50-71.
"Horace and the Material Culture of Augustan Rome: A Revisionary Reading," in T. Habinek and A. Schiesaro, ed. The Roman Cultural Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 105-121.
"Personal and Communal Memory in the Reading of Horace's Odes Books I-III," Arethusa 31 (1998) 43-74.
“Ciceronian ‘Bi-Marcus’: Correspondence with M. Terentius Varro and L. Papirius Paetus in 46 B.C.,” TAPA (1999) 139-180.
“Cicero's Pro Sestio: Spectacle and Performance,” in J. Hallett and S. Dickison, ed. Rome and her Monuments: Essays on the City and Literature of Rome in Honor of Katherine A Geffcken. Illinois, 2000, 369-397.
“Gendering Clodius,” Classical World 94 (2001) 335-359.
"Narrative Space and the Viewer in Philostratus' Eikones,” Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archaeologischen Instituts Römische Abteilung 107 (2000) 237-252.
“Otium as Luxuria in the Status Economy of Pliny’s Letters,” in Re-Imagining Pliny the Younger, Roy Gibson and Ruth Morello, ed. Arethusa 36 (2003) 147-166.
“Constructing Identity: Q. Haterius and C. Trimalchio Decorate their Tombs,” in E.V. D’Ambra and Guy Metraux, eds., The Art of Citizens, Soldiers and Freedmen in the Roman World, Archeo Press, 2006, 1-18.
“An gravius aliquid scribam: Roman seniores write to Iuniores,” TAPA 137 (2006) 247-267.
“Claudia Quinta (pro Caelio 34) and an altar to Magna Mater,” Dictynna 4 (2007) 1-14.
