Professor Ann Pellegrini
A retelling of Medea by the first-century CE Roman Stoic philosopher Seneca the Younger. The Medea by Euripides may be the better known ancient dramatic treatment of this story of OK Cupid gone horribly wrong, but Seneca's version was profoundly influential for later adaptations of the tragic affair of Medea and Jason on the modern European stage, especially in France. In Medea and in his other extant dramatic texts, Seneca gives us a picture of negative affects taken to their murderous limit.
"Medea nunc sum." - Seneca
I was a Classics major in college, and wrote my senior thesis on affect in Senecan drama, an interest in the performance of affect that persists in my research and teaching today. Today, I am more likely to be reading and reading with Freud and Foucault than Seneca, but the practices of close reading I learned as a Classicist remain my first way into a text or performance.