In Beyond Retribution: Re-theorizing Justice through Greek Tragedy, I examine the actions of female protagonists and choruses in eight tragedies in order to theorize justice from their structurally marginalized positions. Through readings of Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and Euripides’ Hecuba, Medea, Ion, and Bacchae, I demonstrate how the texts of the tragedies themselves unsettle the idea of legal retribution as more “impartial” and less harmful than revenge, and conclude that recognizing the values voiced by the tragedies’ female protagonists and choruses provides a means to re-theorize justice in a way that may be more adequate both to the kinds of beings we are and to the redress we seek in turning to the law. Using concepts from carceral studies such as risk, threat, punishment, and alternative forms of redress, like restorative justice, as points of entry into my analysis of Greek tragedies, Beyond Retribution demonstrates Greek tragedy’s usefulness for theorizing a paradigm of tragic subjectivity that undermines and complicates retributive justice practices, and also for illuminating the carceral subjectivity those practices rely on.

Publications
“Reflections on Narcissus: Reading Ovid’s Metamorphoses with High School Students.” The Classical Outlook, forthcoming 2025.

Review of Monsters in Greek Literature: Aberrant Bodies in Ancient Greek Cosmogony, Ethnography, and Biology, by Fiona Mitchell. Rhea Classical Reviews, April 2022.

“Translation catastrophes: Pinplay.” Anne Carson/Antiquity. Ed. Laura Jansen. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2021.

“κυνὸς σῆμα: Euripides’ Hecuba and the Uses of Revenge.” Arethusa, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, pp. 1-19.