Hanna Golab
Adjunct assistant professor
hg2607@columbia.edu
610 Hamilton Hall
Office hours: Wednesdays, 3 p.m.–5 p.m., and by appointment on Zoom.
Research Interests
Ancient Greek Literature and Culture
Epigraphy
Chorality
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 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. 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
2023 Spectating ancient dramas – Athenian audience and its emotional response in Budelmann F., Sluiter I. (eds.) Greek Tragedy and Cognition, Oxford University Press
2023 Popular Culture: at the Festival, LeVen P., Gurd S. (eds.) Cultural History of Music in Antiquity, Bloomsbury
2022 The King and the Falcon: Euripides in an Egyptian Ritual, Classical Philology vol. 117, no. 1, pp. 184-191
2022 Graffiti in an introductory ancient Greek classroom, American Society for Greek and Latin Epigraphy Bulletin, p. 7
2021 Oral Prayer Patterns in Epigraphic Songs to Asklepios in Beck D. (ed.) Repetition, Communication, and Meaning in the Ancient World, Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World vol. 13, Brill, pp. 304-317
2012 Bacchylides’ Spartan Dithyramb in the light of Choral Projection, Eos vol. 99, pp. 15-22
