Jeremy Lefkowitz’s shoptalk will focus on the writing, collecting, and archiving of fables. His current work seeks to develop a new perspective on Aesopica by emphasizing the conditions under which this prototypically oral storytelling tradition came to be written down in antiquity. Who wrote the earliest collections of Aesop's fables? What motivated authors to transform the lowly, popular fable into elite literature? By turning attention to those who wrote Aesop's fables in Greek and Latin, and by considering what the figure of Aesop may have stood for as an authorial figure and literary model, one of the aims of this current work has been to resituate the Aesopic tradition in the literate, learned contexts from which our surviving manuscripts inevitably emerged.

Lefkowitz is the Andrew Heiskell Post-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies at the American Academy in Rome and assistant professor in the Department of Classics at Swarthmore College.