Hanna Golab

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Classics

hg2607@columbia.edu
604 Hamilton Hall

Fall 2024 Office hours: Tuesdays, 1:30p-2:30p and by appointment

Research Interests

  • Ancient Greek Literature and Culture

  • Epigraphy

  • Chorality and Medicine

Dr. Golab is a cultural historian of ancient Greece broadly interested in literature, ritual,

performative arts, epigraphic habit, and cultural exchanges in the Hellenistic and Roman

Imperial periods. Having taught medical humanities courses, she is also expanding her expertise

in the history of ancient medical and environmental thought. Her PhD is from Princeton

University, and her MA from the University of Warsaw, Poland.

In her first book project, “Songs and Stones: Postclassical Greek Chorality,” she explores

epigraphic documents to unearth ancient traditions of poetry written in stone and to analyze how

the materiality of texts meshed with their fleeting performances. Those close readings expand to

bigger questions of the roles that ritual songs could take on in local communities. The project

challenges the status quo of the field of Classics, arguing that instead of choral poetry’s demise,

the postclassical period witnessed both traditional and innovative forms of chorality.

Her second book project is a volume titled Reframing Hellenistic Poetry: Hidden Figures and

Local Canons, which she is co-editing with John Ma. It investigates local canons as a parallel

phenomenon to the one being construed at the most famous library of the ancient world. The

creation of those epichoric canons relied on the labor of people who were usually not considered

active agents in the history of Hellenistic literature and on the processes that were usually

relegated to the archaic and classical periods; for example, female citizens contributed to the local

canons with poetic performances (Korinna, Praxagora of Kos, and an anonymous poetess from

the same island). As a result of our investigation, it shall become clear that canon-making was a

cultural activity characteristic of the Hellenistic period, which was not limited to the Alexandrian

library but spread all around the Mediterranean world.

Dr. Golab’s other recent works include interdisciplinary approaches to ancient audiences and

spectating, an essay on ancient popular culture, an article on a curious use of Euripidean

quotation in an ancient Egyptian ritual, among others.

Selected Publications