Susan Stephens

My early formal training was as a papyrologist. For a number of years I published primarily literary texts from the Oxyrhynchus and the Yale papyrus collections before turning to the areas of research that continue to occupy me: the political and social dimensions of Hellenistic literature, its later reception, and ancient Greek fiction writing. Ancient Greek Novels: the Fragments, written with Jack Winkler, appeared in 1995 and reprinted in 2014. In 1998 I began to write on the Hellenistic poets, contextualizing their writing as responses to a new time and place—the recently founded city of Alexandria. Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria (2003), was a study of how the local Egyptian contours of Ptolemaic kingship informed the poetry of Callimachus, Theocritus, and Apollonius. Since then then I have turned to Callimachus’ reception of earlier writing (particularly Herodotus and Plato), his imagined geographies, and his appropriation of earlier Greek myths of North Africa. Callimachus in Context. From Plato to the Alexandrian Poets (with Benjamin Acosta-Hughes) and Brill’s Companion to Callimachus (co-edited with Acosta-Hughes and Luigi Lehnus) appeared in 2011, and The Poets of Alexandria in 2018.  In addition I produced a commentary on Callimachus’ Hymns (2015) and a commentary on his Epigrams will appear in 2024. Recent interests include ancient athletics and with Charles Stocking produced a Sourcebook on Ancient Greek Athletics in 2021.