Email: hanne.eisenfeld@bc.edu
Classical Mythology; Dangerous Women in Classical Literature; Sex, Power, Gods: Ancient Wisdom Literature; Death in Ancient Greece; Intermediate Greek; Intermediate Latin; Advanced Greek seminars (including Homer's Iliad, Euripides' Helen and the goddess Aphrodite in Greek poetry).
Mythology, Greek Poetry, Greek Religion, Wisdom Literature, Greece and the Ancient Near East.
Hanne Eisenfeld studies mythology, poetry, and religion in the ancient Greek world, and her work emphasizes that these fields are not fully separable from each other at all. Her current research deals with wisdom literature: traditions that ask big questions about human life (how can we be happy? what does it mean to be mortal? why do we suffer?). She is interested especially in how Greek poetry takes up these problems and how it participates in broader wisdom conversations that were taking place around the Mediterranean and in the ancient Near East.
Pindar and Greek Religion: Theologies of Mortality in the Victory Odes, Cambridge University Press. 2022.
"Geryon the Hero, Herakles the God,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 138, 80-99. 2018.
“Life, Death, and a Lokrian Goddess: Revisiting the Nature of Persephone in the Gold Leaves of Magna Graecia,” Kernos 29, 41-72. 2016.
"Ishtar Rejected: Reading a Mesopotamian Goddess in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite," Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 16, 133-162. 2015.
“Of Walls and Monsters: Heracles and Epic Time in Iliad 20,” in Heracles and Early Greek Epic, ed. Christos Tsagalis, Mnemosyne Supplements, Brill. Forthcoming.