In Beyond Retribution: Re-theorizing Justice through Greek Tragedy, I examine the actions of female protagonists and choruses in eight tragedies in order to theorize justice from their structurally marginalized positions. Through readings of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and Euripides’ Hecuba, Medea, Ion, and Bacchae, I demonstrate how the texts of the tragedies themselves unsettle the idea of legal retribution as more “impartial” and less harmful than revenge, and conclude that recognizing the values voiced by the tragedies’ female protagonists and choruses provides a means to re-theorize justice in a way that may be more adequate both to the kinds of beings we are and to the redress we seek in turning to the law. Using concepts from carceral studies such as risk, threat, punishment, and alternative forms of redress, like restorative justice, as points of entry into my analysis of Greek tragedies, Beyond Retribution demonstrates Greek tragedy’s usefulness for theorizing a paradigm of tragic subjectivity that undermines and complicates retributive justice practices, and also for illuminating the carceral subjectivity those practices rely on.

Beyond Retribution makes a historically grounded contribution to carceral studies in its rethinking of texts often identified as foundational sites for the understanding of justice, and offers new readings of Greek tragedies from a feminist, anti-carceral perspective. It also models new approaches to the plays that have strong pedagogical imperatives. My next project, tentatively titled Utopian Classics: Reception Pedagogy for Social Justice, will theorize the classroom as a space of reception and further develop the hospitable pedagogical framework born from my work on Greek tragedy. While recognizing that education in Classics can and has functioned in dystopian ways – to reproduce and uphold class hierarchies, to reinscribe the historical centrality of whiteness, and to enable harmful ideologies and attitudes bolstered by appeals to Greco-Roman antiquity – I will propose a classical reception pedagogy that can empower students to imagine a different, more just world through their engagement with the ancient one.

Publications
“Translation catastrophes: Pinplay.” Anne Carson/Antiquity. Ed. Laura Jansen. Bloomsbury Academic Press, forthcoming 2021.

“κυνὸς σῆμα: Euripides’ Hecuba and the Uses of Revenge.” Arethusa, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-19.