Deborah Chen

Graduate Student

hc3459@columbia.edu

Interests

• Archaic Greek Poetry

• Hellenistic Poetry

• Greek drama

Deborah is a first-year Phd student in the Classics department. She received her B.A. in Classics and History from New York University (2023; with distinction) and M.A. in Classics at Columbia (2025). Her undergraduate Honors thesis focused on reception studies, exploring how Dido has been received in different cultures and across time. Beyond reception studies, she is also interested in archaic Greek poetry, especially the conception of time and the poetics of bodies. Her Master’s thesis thus analyzed specifically Hesiod’s Theogony and explored how the bodies are witnesses to various attempts at control over time, either from the characters or from the poet himself. She discussed different kinds of divine bodies in Hesiod’s narrative: the cannibalistic bodies, the reproductive bodies, the bodies in pain, the bodies in constraint, the bodies in the interim, the monstrous bodies that need interventions, and, overall, the bodies experiencing time. In the end, she argued that the handling of time becomes the poetic metalanguage used by Hesiod to reinterpret the divine atemporality to his audience and cast a mortal “looking” at the atemporal divine horizon. Going forward, she hopes to continue to explore this area, not only in poetry but also in Greek drama.

In the meantime, Deborah is also very interested in material culture and Mediterranean archaeology. Recently, she participated in the Lyktos Archaeological Project, in section B, led by Angelos Chaniotis. During her time in Lyktos, Crete, she was fascinated by the epigraphical materials and trade networks that Lyktos developed, as evidenced by the pottery and marble finds, and was inspired to learn more about the methodology of archaeology and how the study of material culture enhances our understanding of literature.

Outside of Classics, Deborah enjoys hiking and camping, going to different coffee shops and bakeries in the city.