Simone Oppen

I specialize in Greek drama and historiography, in particular literary production under the Athenian Empire and its later reception.

I received my BA in Classical Languages and Comparative Literature (a double major with a minor in Dance and Performance Studies) from UC Berkeley, and PhD in Classics from Columbia University. In addition, I have excavated multiple seasons at Columbia University’s excavations at the Villa Adriana in Tivoli and served as trench supervisor at the ASCSA excavations in ancient Corinth. My research and training have been supported by fellowships from the German Academic Exchange Service, the Fulbright Program, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the Jacobi Foundation, and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science, among others. 

My in-progress book, provisionally entitled Mediation and memory of the Greco-Persian Wars from Aeschylus to Isocrates, examines how literary invocation of ruins shaped larger cultural narratives around empathy and retribution. I am also at work on a database and article publishing vase inscriptions from the area that became Corinth’s Roman forum. I have published articles on lament for the fallen city in the Sumerian City Laments and Greek tragedy, gendered ways of viewing a divine body in Callimachus’ fifth hymn to Athena, and an edition of a Homeric papyrus. I also regularly review scholarship on Greek historiography and drama.

My extensive background staging ancient Greek drama inspires my engagement with the past. As an undergraduate, I directed a production of Euripides’ Hippolytus in ancient Greek (the first such performance at UC Berkeley in over 40 years); as a graduate student I worked with Barnard Columbia Ancient Drama as a stage-manager and producer, director, and actress. In my previous position at Dartmouth College, I directed a virtual dramatic reading of Aeschylus’ Persians in English (with choral lyric sung in ancient Greek) featuring undergraduates in collaboration with students learning ancient Greek at Woodstock Union High School in Vermont. I would love to continue such creative and collaborative work in the Twin Cities and larger Minnesota community.