Niobe’s Transformations, Between Ovid and Wheatley

Ellen Oliensis is the Klio Distinguished Professor of Classical Languages and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, specializing in literary criticism centered on Latin poetry. Her scholarship is especially influenced by psychoanalysis, which she takes up chiefly as a mode of reading attentive to strains and defects in the textual surface. For the past decade her scholarship has revolved around Ovid. Her latest book, a study of Ovid’s Amores, focuses on the intertwining of the poet’s erotic and writerly impulses. She is currently working on a commentary on Book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and on a set of essays on the comedies of Plautus.