Classics Professor Debbie Felton Presented on 'Ghost Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome' in Springfield
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Professor Debbie Felton in the Department of Classics presented a talk on "Ghost Stories from Ancient Greece and Rome" at the Springfield Museums on Oct. 26. The talk was part of the museum's Listen & Learn lecture series.
During the talk, Felton discussed how ancient Greeks and Romans liked to tell ghost stories—many of which sounded surprisingly similar to modern ones. These ancient stories are full of walking corpses, flesh-eating ghouls, the grateful dead, necromancy, poltergeists, and especially haunted houses.
Felton has a bachelor of arts degree in English and Latin from UCLA; a master of arts degree in Greek; and a Ph.D. in Classics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has taught at UMass since 1999. The interdisciplinary nature of her research interests has led to her focus on folklore in classical literature, especially anything about the supernatural and monstrous. She has been Editor of the journal "Preternature" since 2015.
She is currently working on two edited volumes: "The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth," which includes forty chapters addressing various classical monsters, their interpretations, and their cultural afterlives, and "A Cultural History of Monsters in Antiquity" (Bloomsbury), a thematically organized volume with chapters covering monsters from the ancient world with regard to cosmologies, geographies, environments, behaviors, and identities.