Susannah Wright’s research centers on Greco-Roman literature, history, and culture and its medieval and modern receptions. Areas of particular interest include Latin and Greek epic texts of all periods, women and gender in antiquity, politics and literature in late republican and imperial Rome, and ancient and medieval histories of the Trojan War. At Rice, she is a faculty affiliate of the History Department.
 
In her current book project, Wright traces the evolution of gendered ideas about grief and decorum in epic verse from the Iliad to the twelfth century CE, showing how flexible codes of propriety enabled poets to depict loss in ways at once deeply traditional and fiercely innovative. Together with Scott McGill, she is completing a verse translation of the Aeneid, to be published by W. W. Norton in 2025. She has also published on medieval Irish historical texts that adapt classical epic into cyclical chronicles.
 
Wright is a Rice alumna and received her Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2024. While at Harvard, she taught courses on Greek and Latin literature and culture from Homer to the Middle Ages, including authors such as Plato, Euripides, Caesar, Suetonius, Augustine, and Bernard of Clairvaux. At Rice, she teaches both languages at all levels, as well as history and culture courses on Greco-Roman antiquity and its afterlives in the Middle Ages and the modern world.

Education

Ph.D., Harvard University
A.M., Harvard University
B.A., Rice University

Fall 2024 Courses:

CLAS 238 - Epic Journeys

CLAS 493 - Senior Thesis