Education
- PhD, Princeton University
Research and Teaching
- Classical Literature
- Archaic Greek Poetry
- Oral Tradition and Performance
Recent Courses
- CLAS 237 Aristotle’s Poetics
- CLAS 235 Classical Mythology
- CLAS 124 Classical Antiquity in Children’s Literature
- FWIS 156 Speech and Communication in Homer
Speech, performance, storytelling, and communication are at the center of Hilary Mackie’s work both as a scholar and as a teacher. In addition to courses on ancient Greek language, classical myth, and related topics for the Classical Studies program, she contributes on a regular basis to Rice’s Program in Writing and Communication by offering writing-intensive seminars for incoming freshmen.
Mackie is the author of two books. Graceful Errors (2003) focuses on the oral context of Pindar’s odes and the dynamic relationship between the poet and the audience. Talking Trojan (1996) is an analysis of the different speaking styles of Greek and Trojan characters in Homer's Iliad. More recently, she has worked on the concept of the labyrinth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the connections between Plato’s Timaeus and Hesiod’s Theogony.
Mackie is the Program Advisor for Classical Studies at Rice.
Selected Publications
1. Books and Edited Volumes
- Graceful Errors: Pindar and the Performance of Praise (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2003).
- Talking Trojan: Speech and Community in the Iliad (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).
2. Journal Articles and Book Chapters
- “Storytelling,” in Margalit Finkelberg (ed.), The Homer Encyclopedia (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), III, 826-8.
- “The Key to Epic Life? Classical Study in George Eliot’s Middlemarch,” Classical World 103 (2009), 53-67.
- “‘It Wasn’t Like That’: Demeter and Persephone, Fiction-writing and Myth in Margaret Drabble’s Peppered Moth,”Amphora 8 (2009), 22-3.
- “Song and Storytelling: An Odyssean Perspective,” Transactions of the American Philological Association 127 (1997), 77-96.
