The Modern Greek Studies Association (MGSA) John O. Iatrides Prize for the best English-language Dissertation in the USA & Canada is awarded to Amanda Marie Kubic (PhD'26) for Animating Antiquity: Classical (Dis)embodiments by Modern Women.
Amanda's dissertation distinguished itself through its originality, intellectual ambition, elegant prose, and sophisticated interdisciplinary approach. Combining close textual analysis with research in dance and performance studies, the project offers a compelling reimagining of classical reception through the lenses of gender, embodiment, disability, and cultural inheritance. It examines how twentieth- and twenty-first-century Greek and Anglo-American women and gender-diverse artists creatively reinterpret classical Greco-Roman texts, figures, and forms, drawing on sources such as the fragments of Sappho, the Venus de Milo, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the works of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. More specifically, it argues that contemporary artists, dancers, photographers, and poets—including Mary Duffy, Loie Fuller, Robin Coste Lewis, Olga Broumas and T. Begley, and Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke—produce forms of "classical (dis)embodiment" that fragment, transform, and multiply the body in ways that challenge traditional ideals of the classical body as male, white, singular, and fixed, while opening space for queer, racialized, disabled, and other non-normative identities.
Congratulations, Amanda; we're looking forward to celebrating with you at the MGSA Symposium in Chicago!
