Natalie (she/her) studies the Nachleben of the Homeric Hermes and the Lesbian Sappho in (i) (un)translated intertexts and translations in Ovid’s Amores, Heroides, Metamorphoses, Tristia and (ii) contemporary speculative fiction (After Sappho; Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence).
She is currently developing papers on reading Aglauros’ infection by envy and petrification by Mercury as Catullan translations of fr. 31 in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Sappho’s epistolary Nachleben from Ovid’s Heroides 15 to Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho (2022). Natalie is fascinated by how Hermes exchanging his lyric subjectivity (giving Apollo the lyre) for epic versatility (timai or honored attributes) in Homer and Ovid inaugurates traduttore, traditore or translation-as-betrayal through eroticized violence (e.g. killing a hetaira /tortoise to make a lyre).
Her MSt dissertation will consider this Nachleben of Hermes/Mercury as fantasies of traduttore traditore by looking at how R.F. Kuang’s Babel (2022) translates the multivalent god through entangling Babel, the Hermes Society, and imperial silver-making as (neo)colonial translation. Beyond this, Natalie has research interests in Homer and early Greek hexameter poetry; Greek lyric (Sappho, Pindar); Hellenistic poets (Callimachus, Theocritus); Late Republic / Early Augustan poets (Catullus; Lucretius; Vergil; Ovid); CS Lewis; Anglophone literary reception (long 18th c. – present); affect and embodiment; and media studies (film/television, webtoons).
