Graduate Student Alyson Melzer Receives Mabelle McLeod Lewis Fellowship

The Trustees of the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Memorial Fund have awarded Alyson Melzer a full-year dissertation fellowship to support completion of her dissertation entitled:The Somatics of Style: Performance, Poetics, and the Body in Greek Literary Criticism. Its main thesis is that the Greek critics conceptualize and analyze style as an intensely performative, fundamentally physical entity, and view the entire body as participating in its creation and enjoyment.  Alyson demonstrates that this major fact, which has never been articulated before, shaped the critics' conceptual apparatus, diction, and imagery. This far-reaching realization leads her to make compelling arguments about how Greek literary critical discourses absorbed the long and powerful traditions of musical paideia from previous centuries and creatively adapted them for new, diverse cultural situations in which literacy was gradually gaining prominence.