Carina de Klerk

Graduate Student

cd2785@columbia.edu

Interests

• Greek drama

• Greek and Roman Epic

• Lyric poetry

• Epistolography

• Performance studies

• Representations of enslaved people in Greek Literature

• Classical Reception

• Mythology

Carina de Klerk is a scholar of Ancient Greek literature, with a particular focus on Greek drama. Her current research deals with the representation of enslaved people in the comedies of Aristophanes. More specifically, in her dissertation, she takes seriously an observation made by scholars who study artifacts relating to the performance of comedy—namely, it appears that the slaves of Old Comedy were not strongly differentiated from other types of characters in aspects of body, costume, and mask. Her dissertation explores how this observation changes the way we understand both the performance of the slave in specific plays as well as the development of the slave across the extant plays of Aristophanes. Her dissertation is provisionally entitled “Where’s Xanthias?: The Ambiguity of the Slave in Aristophanes.”

Carina has been interested in character identity, more broadly, for some time now and has contributed a chapter on the politics of the social composition of Aristophanes’ plays to the volume Aristophanes and Politics: New Studies (2020). She enjoys sharing her research at conferences of all stripes, especially the Classical Association of Canada’s Annual Meeting, at which she most recently shared work from her dissertation in May 2023.

At present, Carina is a Lecturer at SUNY Binghamton, where she teaches courses in translation and introductory and intermediate language courses in Latin and Greek. Carina also served as an instructor of record at Columbia, teaching Elementary and Intermediate Greek and Latin. In addition, she has had the privilege of serving as a Core Curriculum Preceptor in Literature Humanities from the Fall of 2019 to the Spring of 2021.

Much of Carina’s research and teaching is directly informed by her experience in making theatre both within the university context and without. She has produced translations for use in performance and she has co-directed productions of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Euripides’ Hippolytus, and Aristophanes’ Frogs, the former being performed in the original Greek. This hands-on experience has sharpened the critical eye with which she studies the performance of Greek drama. It has also helped her to bring alive this same body of work for her students. But more than that, the understanding of what makes theater successful is the very thing which forms the foundation of her teaching practice.

When she’s not in her study or in a classroom, you’ll find Carina on a bike or in the woods or in a garden. Recent personal accomplishments in these areas include: successfully evading the squash vine borer long enough to harvest an armload of zucchini, cycling 100 miles in one day at a personal record of 14.4mph, and hiking up Algonquin peak, the second tallest mountain in NY state.

Selected Publications

• (2020), "The Politics of Diversity: A Quantitative Analysis of Aristophanes," in Rosen, R.M. and Foley, H.P. (eds), Aristophanes and Politics: New Studies. Brill: Leiden, 137-162.