This talk will consider a range of different scenes in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey from the female perspective. It will look at how female characters weave their stories in the greater epic narrative with a focus on Helen, Penelope, Nausicaa, and Andromache. When we act as archaeologists of ancient literature, trying to "excavate" beneath the lines we read, we can recover some lost oral genres (such as work and wedding songs) and have insights into the emotion and experience of the ancient world. 

Andromache Karanika is Professor and Chair of Classics at the University of California, Irvine. She has published numerous articles on Homer, women’s oral genres, pastoral poetry, and the literature of late antiquity and Byzantium. She is the author of Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor in Ancient Greece (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014). Her new book, Wedding, Gender and Performance in Ancient Greece is forthcoming with Oxford University Press in October of 2024. She co-edited (with V. Panoussi)  a volume on Emotional Trauma in Greece and Rome: Representations and Reactions (Routledge, 2020). She also served as editor of TAPA (for years 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021). She co-edited the 150th anniversary volume (with D. Mastronarde) for the Society of Classical Studies and its journal (formerly known as Transactions of the American Philological Association). She served as President of CAMWS (Classical Association of the Middle West and South) in 2023–2024.