Alex Purves

Alex Purves is Professor of Classics at UCLA. Her research focuses on the relationship between body, time, and environment in early Greek poetry and prose. She is the author of Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (2010) and Homer and the Poetics of Gesture (2019), editor of Touch and the Ancient Senses (2018) and co-editor, with Shane Butler, of Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses (2013). She is interested in the reception of antiquity up to the present day and has written on the work of W. G. Sebald, Henry Fuseli, and Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding. She is co-organizer of a multi-year “Elemental Readings” project, the first of which – a conference on Air co-organized with Louise Hornby – will take place at UCLA in May 2023. Her Guggenheim project focuses on the element of water and its circulation in Homeric epic and beyond. Alex Purves’ work has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies. In 2016 she was Spinoza Visiting Research Fellow at Leiden University and in 2023 will deliver the Erwin Rohde Lectures at the University of Heidelberg.