Classics Professor Melissa Mueller Named Spotlight Scholar
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Classics Professor Melissa Mueller has been named a 2023 UMass Amherst Spotlight Scholar. Spotlight Scholars initiative shines a light on faculty working for positive social change through research, scholarship, and creative activity.
At her core, Mueller is a reader: someone who loves immersing herself in another world through a great novel, poem, or dramatic work. As a literary scholar and critic in the Department of Classics of UMass Amherst’s College of Humanities & Fine Arts, she studies early Greek poetry, from Homer through Greek tragedy, and has spent her career not only reading such works, but re-reading them over and over for her teaching and research.
“When I re-read a text, it becomes completely different because I myself am changing,” said Mueller.
It was around 20 years ago that Mueller first began reading and thinking about the Greek poet Sappho, the subject of her forthcoming book, and she has found that certain poems have resonated with her differently as she has aged.
Mueller was introduced to Classics at a young age through her New York City school’s Latin requirement for students in sixth grade and up. The summer she turned 18, she enrolled in an intensive Greek course at the City University of New York (CUNY), through which she learned Greek grammar and read Euripides and Plato. “I fell in love with the language and thought, ‘This is what I want to do,’” Mueller recalled.