Pauline LeVen

Pauline LeVen's picture
Professor of Classics and (by courtesy) of Music; interim chair of the Humanities Program (Spring 2023)
305 Phelps Hall
203-432-0983
Born in Monaco and raised in France, Pauline LeVen studied at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (Paris), the Sorbonne and Princeton University, and earned a joint PhD from both in 2008. She was a Fulbright student in 2001–02 and the Phi Beta Kappa Sibley Fellow in Greek Studies in 2007–08.
 
Her first book, The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2014 and was a recipient of the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Yale College Prize for outstanding publication. The book is a study of the extant corpus of Greek songs composed between about 440 BC and 320 BC. Combining close readings of little-studied texts with attention to their intellectual and cultural context, it examines Greek literary history between the classical and Hellenistic periods and explores the vibrancy of musical culture in the late classical period.
 
LeVen’s second book, Music and Metamorphosis in Greco-Roman Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2021) considers Imperial Greek and Roman narratives devoted to the music of human-turned-non-human animals and natural phenomena (birds, winds, frogs, echoes, insects, marsh-reeds…). It argues that fantastic tales of animal metamorphosis are important loci of reflection on aesthetic and ontological questions. The seven readings it offers (including of Plato’s myth of the cicadas, of Ovid’s story of the origins of the echo, and of Achilles Tatius’ narrative of the nightingale myth) are windows onto a rich web of ideas about the beauty of music, appropriate responses to it, and the nature of the experience of sound and song.
 
Her forthcoming publication is a volume co-edited with Sean Gurd – the first volume of the six-volume Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury), devoted to Antiquity. The book represents an important step in opening up the dialogue between Classics and musicology; it comprises eight essays by established and emerging scholars in the field, devoted to the topics of society, philosophies, popular culture, politics, education, exchange, performance, and technologies.
 
LeVen is currently working on two projects. The first is a monograph entitled Reading Greek Poetry in the Anthropocene, in which she investigates the kind of claims that lyric poetry (from archaic song to imperial epigrams) makes about experiences of the non-human world (in particular about rocks, water, trees, and light). She argues that taking matter at face value leads to fundamental insights about the relationship lyric entertains with temporality, framing, and scale. The second project is a short book co-authored with Sean Gurd, The Musician in Nine Greek Myths. The volume explores features of the social history of ancient music, starting from interpretations of ancient mythical figures (among which Orpheus, Apollo, and the Sirens). It focuses on questions that have surprisingly rarely been asked, such as the paradoxical social status of musicians, the relationship between music and violence in the mythic imagination, or the famous but elusive relationship between music and therapy.

Field

Greek Literature and Language

Specialism

Greek Poetry, Literary Criticism, Musical Culture, Imperial Literature, Posthumanities Ecocriticism

Current courses 

Fall 2022: Graduate proseminar; Sappho and the Lyric; Spring 2023: History of Greek
Literature II

 Selected Recent Publications

- “New Music,” in L. Swift (ed.) 2022, Routledge Companion to Greek Lyric. Malden
- Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought. 2021. Cambridge
- “Pan and the Music of Nature” in E. Rocconi and T. Lynch (eds.) 2021, Routledge
Companion to Greek and Roman Music. Malden
- “Doing Philosophy in the Elephant’s Mouth: Three Readings of Two Ekphrases in
Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon IV.4” in E. Cueva et al. (eds.) 2018, Re-
Wiring the Ancient Novel. Vol. 1: Greek Novels. Groningen, 109-126
- “The Erogenous Ear: Mythologies of Listening” in S. Butler and S. Nooter (eds.)
2018, Sound and the Senses. New York, 212-232
- “Echo’s Bones and the Metamorphoses of the Voice,” Greek and Roman Musical
Studies 6.1 (2018): 14-25

For more information: https://yale.academia.edu/PaulineLeVen

Pauline LeVen cv