UCL Department of Greek & Latin

Department of Greek & Latin

• Home
• Staff
• Events
• Research
• Classical Play
• Public Engagement
• Alumni
• Newsletter
• Contact Us
• Continuing Education

Follow @GrandLat

---

Laura Swift

Leverhulme Research Fellow

Office hours:

Email: l.swift@ucl.ac.uk

Research interests: Greek drama; choral song; Greek lyric, elegiac, and iambic poetry; early Greek epic

Before joining UCL, I studied and taught at Oxford, where I completed my BA, Masters, and doctorate at Magdalen College, then held a Junior Research Fellowship at Trinity College, and was a stipendiary lecturer at New College. I am now a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at UCL. I was originally raised in London, and am glad to be returning to the capital.

I am currently preparing a commentary on the 7th century BC poet Archilochus, famous in antiquity for his blame-poetry. My previous work focused on the relationship between the tragic chorus and other forms of choral song: my book on the subject was published by OUP in 2010. I have also worked more generally on Greek drama, and have published several articles, as well as a short book on Euripides’ Ion.

I am looking forward to teaching courses on Greek tragedy, comedy, and myth at UCL this year, and I am also academic advisor to the department's annual Greek drama production at the Bloomsbury Theatre.

Larger Publications:

• Euripides: Ion (Duckworth Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy). May 2008
• The Hidden Chorus: Echoes of Genre in Tragic Lyric (Oxford University Press). January 2010.

Articles and Chapters:

• "Mixed Choruses and Marriage Songs: A New Interpretation of the Third Stasimon of the Hippolytus". JHS 126 (2006): 125-40.
• "Sexual and Familial Distortion in Euripides' Phoenissae". TAPhA 139.1 (2009): 53-87.
• "The Symbolism of Space in Euripidean Choral Fantasy (Hipp. 732-75, Med. 824-65, Bacch. 370-433)". CQ 59.2 (2009): 364-82.
• "How to Make a Goddess Angry: Making Sense of the Demeter Ode in Euripides' Helen". Classical Philology 104.4 (2009): 418-38.
• "Epinician and Tragic Worlds: The Case of Sophocles' Trachiniae", forthcoming in Archaic and Classical Choral Song, eds L. Athanassaki and E. Bowie, de Gruyter (Trends in Classics), 2010.
• "Paeanic and Epinician Healing in Euripides' Alcestis", forthcoming in Greek Drama IV, eds J. Davidson and D. Rosenbloom, Oxbow, 2010.
• “Visual imagery in Parthenaic Song”. Forthcoming in The Look of Lyric, eds A. Lardinois, R. Martin and A.-E. Peponi.
• "Conflicting Identities in the Euripidean Chorus", forthcoming in Choral Mediations, eds R. Gagné and M. Hopman, CUP, 2011.
• "Euripides: Medea", in The Blackwell Companion to Euripides, ed. R. Mitchell-Boyask. Under commission (to appear in 2011).