Freya Schlaefer

Freya is a PhD student on the Language & Literature track. She received her B.A. in Classics from Reed College in 2023 and her M.A. in Medieval Icelandic Studies from Háskóli Íslands (the University of Iceland) in 2024. Her undergraduate thesis, “Gastric Heroics: Towards a Grammar of Eating in Archaic Greek Poetry,” and her master’s thesis, “Lát grǫn sía: Poetics of the Mouth in Egils saga and Vǫlsunga saga,” focused on the presentation of bodies and body parts in residually oral texts. Her primary research interest lies in oral poetics, with a particular eye to the relationship between body and word in oral and residually oral cultures.

Freya focuses primarily on archaic Greek poetry, particularly Homer and Hesiod. Her interest in orality extends to a more general interest in oral performance and interaction, encompassing spoken rites, verbal confrontations, lies, jokes, and riddles, as well as the media and interfaces which allow and have allowed for interaction with premodern texts from past to present.