Color photo of a woman smiling at the camera against a studio backdrop

Vassiliki Panoussi

Andrew Heiskell/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation/National Endowment for the Humanities Rome Prize
2 settembre 2024–3 luglio 2025
Professione
Chancellor Professor of Classical Studies, William and Mary
Titolo del progetto
The Goddess Isis in Roman Literature: Gender, Ethnicity, and Identity
Descrizione del progetto

This book examines representations of the Egyptian goddess Isis in various Roman literary texts, such as love poetry, epic, occasional poetry, historiography, rhetoric, philosophy, and the novel. Isis provides a unique opportunity to fruitfully examine the nexus of ethnicity and gender to gain important insights into how Roman authors responded to, shaped, or understood these intersecting identities. The goddess emerges as able to inhabit simultaneously several ethnic categories, such as Greek, Egyptian, and Roman. As a female deity, she is both a universal mother and a victimized other, offering a sense of belonging to different individuals and groups in the globalizing Greco-Roman world from the first century BCE to the second century CE. My analysis demonstrates the complexity of all these identifications and contributes to our understanding of the popularity of Isis in Roman literary texts and Roman thought more generally.

The photograph of Vassiliki Panoussi was taken by Stephen Salpukas.