CONTRIBUTORS

Margaret Hiebert Beissingeris Lecturer in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of The Art of the Lautar: The Epic Tradition of Romania (New York: Garland Press, 1991) as well as articles on Romanian and South Slavic oral traditions and literature. Her current research interests include gender issues in Balkan oral poetry.

Elaine Fantham is Giger Professor of Latin at Princeton University. She is author of commentaries on Seneca's tragedy The Trojan Women and book 2 of Lucan's Civil War, Comparative Studies in Republican Latin Imagery (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972); and, most recently, Roman Literary Culture from Cicero to Apuleius (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). She is coauthor with H. Foley, N. Kampen, S. Pomeroy, and A. Shapiro of Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994 and 1995).

Joseph Farrell is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Vergil's "Georgics "and the Traditions of Ancient Epic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Latin Language and Latin Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). His current research includes a study of the idea of the classic as it developed in antiquity and as it functions within modern theoretical discourse. He is also director of The Vergil Project, a collaborative, WWW-based resource for learning, teaching, and research about Virgil.

Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger is Associate Professor of Religion at Emory Univer-

sity. She is the author of Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1996) and coeditor of Oral Epics in India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) and Boundaries of the Text: Performing the Epics in South and Southeast Asia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1991). Currently, she is writing an ethnographic study on a female Muslim folk healer in South India.

Andrew Ford is Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He is author of Homer: The Poetry of the Past (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992) and numerous articles on Greek poetics and literary history in such journals as Arion and Common Knowledge and in The New Companion to Homer (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1997). He is currently writing a book-length study of the origins of literary criticism in classical Greece.

Thomas M. Greene is Frederick Clifford Ford Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University. His publications include The Descent from Heaven: A Study in Epic Continuity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963); The Light In Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), which received the Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association and the James Russell Lowell Prize from the Modern Language Association; and The Vulnerable Text: Essays on Renaissance Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). He is also the author of numerous articles, chiefly on early modern literature, and is the coeditor of a volume on literary theory. Greene is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and received the Medal of the Collège de France in 1989. He is currently the organizer and manager of a theater company that produces plays in Connecticut high schools about ethical dilemmas.

Philip Hardie is a University Lecturer in Classics at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of New Hall. He is the author of Virgil's "Aeneid": Cosmos and Imperium (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986); The Epic Successors of Virgil: A Study in the Dynamics of a Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); and Virgil, Aeneid IX, Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). He is currently completing a commentary on Ovid's Metamorphoses, books 13-15, and is preparing a book on fame and rumor from Homer to Pope.

Sheila Murnaghan is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She is author of Disguise and Recognition in the "Odyssey" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987) and coeditor of Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture: Differential Equations (London: Routledge, 1998). She works on Greek epic and tragedy, gender in classical Greece, and the classical tradition.

Gregory Nagy is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and

Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. He is the author of The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), which won the American Philological Association's Goodwin Award of Merit in 1982. His other publications include Comparative Studies in Greek and Indic Meter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), Greek Mythology and Poetics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990), Pindar's Homer: The Lyric Possession of an Epic Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), and Homeric Questions (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996). His special research interests are archaic Greek literature and oral poetics, and he finds it rewarding to integrate these interests with teaching, especially in his course for Harvard's Core Curriculum, "The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization." He is currently chair of Harvard's Classics Department.

Dwight F. Reynolds is Associate Professor of Arabic Language and Literature in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995), coeditor of Musical Narrative Traditions of Asia (special issue of Asian Music, 1995), editor of Arabic Autobiography (special issue of Edebiyat: Journal of Middle Eastern Literatures, 1997), and editor of Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition (forthcoming). He is currently completing a comparative study of premodern Arabic and European autobiographies.

William Sax is Senior Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand. He is the author of Mountain Goddess: Gender and Politics in a Himalayan Pilgrimage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and editor of The Gods at Play: Lila in South Asia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). He is currently writing a book on Himalayan ritual performances of Mahabharata.

Susan Slyomovics is the Geneviève McMillan-Reba Stewart Professor of the Study of Women in the Developing World and Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of The Merchant of Art: An Egyptian Hilali Oral Epic Poet in Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) and Memory and Architecture: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming) as well as numerous articles on theater and performance in the Middle East and North Africa.

Jane Tylus is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993) and of numerous arti-

cles on Renaissance culture, literature, and theater. She is currently completing a book entitled Pastoral Gossip: Shakespeare, Lope, Guarini and beginning another on the relationship between religious and humanist norms of imitation in early modern Europe and the Americas.

Susanne Lindgren Wofford is Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is author of The Choice of Achilles: The Ideology of Figure in the Epic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). She is editor of Hamlet: A Case Study in Contemporary Criticism (Boston: Bedford Books, 1994) and of the New Century Views volume Shakespeare: The Late Tragedies (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1994). She has published articles on Shakespeare, Spenser, Boccaccio, and Botticelli and is currently at work on two book projects, one entitled Epic and Origin and the other Theatrical Power: Mimesis and Contagion on the Shakespearean Stage.