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.