Pauline LeVen

Pauline LeVen (Ph.D. Princeton / Sorbonne 2008) is professor of classics and, by courtesy, music, and the current chair of the Humanities Program. A literary critic and historian of ancient Greek literature and musical culture, she studies poetic and prose texts from the archaic to the imperial period, with a special interest in questions of language and form.

She is the author of two monographs, The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry (Cambridge 2014, a recipient of the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Yale College Prize for outstanding publication) and Music and Metamorphosis in Graeco-Roman Thought (Cambridge 2021). She has also co-edited, with Sean Gurd, the first volume of the six-volume Cultural History of Western Music (Bloomsbury 2023), devoted to antiquity.

LeVen is currently working on two projects. The first is a monograph entitled Greek Poetry and the Anthropocene, in which she examines the kind of claims that lyric poetry makes about experiences of the non-human world (in particular about rocks, water, air, and light). The second project is a book co-authored with Sean Gurd, The Musician in Nine Greek Myths, which reads myths about ancient musicians (Orpheus, the Sirens, Marsyas…) as investigations about the ethics and aesthetics of music.