The Department of Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies recently welcomed a new pre-doctoral fellow, Erin Lam, whose fellowship is sponsored by the . The Consortium for Faculty Diversity is committed to increasing the diversity of students, faculty members, and curricular offerings at liberal arts colleges with a particular focus on enhancing the diversity of faculty members and of applicants for faculty positions.
As a Ph.D. student from the University of California at Berkeley, Lam will finish her dissertation while teaching at ÀÏÍõÂÛ̳ this year and then become a post-doctoral fellow next year.
Lam's research investigates how intersectional queer methodologies can be applied to ancient Classical texts in order to reexamine concepts such as gender, reproduction, identity, and subjectivity.
Her current projects include her dissertation on Ovid’s Heroides, which explores queer orientations to futurity and community building, celebrating non-reproductive futurities and radical acts of care. A second project interprets Ovidian exile poetry through the recent turn to wildness in queer theory to consider how the Other is constructed via depictions of animality and nature.
She will teach a course in the spring titled (Re)Productions from Antiquity to Modernity, which will investigate ancient and modern cultural attitudes towards labor and reproduction (biological, textual, and artistic) in texts such as Euripides’ Medea, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
Lam is committed to supporting learners from varied backgrounds through pedagogy, mentorship, and community building. She is currently a member of the which provides microgrants to students in Classics with the aim of increasing economic diversity in the field. She has taught in the San Quentin prison and the Mellon Mays program. She was the co-chair and organizer for the national Queer and Asian Conference, and an organizer for Women in Classics.