Congratulations to DOCTOR Tori Lee who defended her dissertation, "Violent by Nature: Danger and Darkness in the Pastoral World." Tori's dissertation challenges the scholarly idea that pastoral literature is an idyllic utopia, arguing instead that danger and violence are innate to the landscape. When we view pastoral through fresh eyes—from a woman’s perspective, for example, or with a critical approach to the scholarly tradition--we see that ancient pastoral literature constructs an environment of continuous violation for its inhabitants. Scholars have tended to elide and overlook violence in numerous ways—for example, by minimizing the role of intimate partner abuse or physical combat. Tori breaks down the traditional dichotomy of city-as-seat-of-danger versus country-as-safe-haven, arguing instead that the features of each imagined location migrate back and forth . By identifying this tendency towards violence and violation in non-canonical pastoral texts, Tori's research transforms the way we read the genre of pastoral in antiquity and beyond.
Next year Tori will be taking up a fellowship at Boston University as a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Society of Fellows.
Classical Studies
