Classics Professor Melissa Mueller Publishes New Book on Greek Lyric Poet Sappho

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Melissa Mueller, professor of classics, has written a new book on the archaic Greek lyric poet Sappho. Published by Cambridge University Press on Dec. 21, 2023, Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading offers a new approach to the relationship between lyric and epic poetry in ancient Greece. The book will be featured during a book symposium on Sappho and Homer at Yale this April, as well as in a colloquium hosted by the Department of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley in May, "Sappho, Homer, and Tragedy: Reading with Sedgwick, Bespaloff, and Butler."

Like all lyric poets of her time, Sappho was steeped in the affects and story world of Homeric epic, the language, characters, and themes of her lyrics often intersecting with those of Homer. Yet the relationship between these two poets has usually been framed as competitive and antagonistic. Mueller’s book charts a more promising way forward, setting Sappho and Homer side by side within the embrace of a non-hierarchical, “reparative reading” culture, as first conceived by queer theorist and poet Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.  

Part I of Mueller's book offers an introduction to reparative reading and the cultures of critique (and post-critique) within which it has emerged over the past several decades. Part 2 guides readers through close readings of most of the longer fragments of Sappho, considering the Homeric tradition to which Sappho and her ancient listeners on Lesbos may have had access. 

By bringing two of the most celebrated poets from Greek antiquity into conversation with contemporary theorists of gender, sexuality, and affect studies, Sappho and Homer: A Reparative Reading reintroduces readers to a Sappho who embraces and supplements Homer’s vision, while inviting us to situate ourselves as collaborative readers of the classical tradition. 

Mueller is also the author of Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and co-editor of The Materialities of Greek Tragedy: Objects and Affect in Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (2018). She serves as a mentor for The Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus (AAACC) and as series co-editor of “Ancient Cultures, New Materialisms” for Edinburgh University Press.