Nancy Sultan

Professor of Greek and Roman Studies

Ph.D. Comparative Literature, Harvard University; M.A. Classical Studies, University of Minnesota (Aegean archaeology focus); B.A. Classics, Minor in Music, UNC-Greensboro

Nancy Sultan is Professor and past Director of Greek and Roman Studies. She joined the faculty in 1993. She has published and taught widely in the area of Hellenic Cultural Studies. Her interests include oral poetics (cross-cultural approaches), mythology & folklore, ethnomusicology, Aegean archaeology, modern Greek folk poetry and drama, and gender studies. She has participated in archaeological excavations at Gournia and Mochlos on the island of Crete, and at the site of Naukratis, Egypt. She is the recipient of many grants, awards, and honors, including the Excellence in College Teaching Award presented by the American Philological Association in 2009.

Publications - Monograph

• Exile and the Poetics of Loss in Greek Tradition. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

 

Recent conference presentations: 

• 2018. "New Light on the use of melopoieia in Greek drama: A Look at Sanskrit parallels," NEH Summer Seminar on the Bhgavad Gita and its Modern Readers, Yale University.
• 2017. "What Sanskrit drama might teach us about music and audience reception of later Greek drama," for the MOISA society panel (the International Society for the Study of Greek and Roman Music and its Cultural Heritage) at the Society for Classical Studies meeting in Toronto, CA. 
• 2014. "Pseudolus at the IWU Ludi Megalenses: Re-creating Roman Comedy in Context," Classical Association of Atlantic States. October.
• 2014. "Let us Now Praise Wicked Men: House of Cards (2103-14) and the 'Fifth Age' of Television," Film & History Conference. Madison, WI.
• 2014. "The Greeks Take Camelot! Jacqueline Kennedy and the Classical Ideal," Invited lecture, Purdue University. 

Recent Journal Articles:

• 2015. “Pseudolus at the IWU Ludi Megalenses: Re-creating Roman Comedy in Context,” Classical Journal 111.1. 
• 2012. “Jacqueline Kennedy and the Classical Ideal,” Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC. 

Prof. Sultan is also a fiction writer. Her plays have won competitions and have been performed at Heartland Theatre, Normal IL, and IWU. Her current fiction project is a fictional biography of the Greek sculptor Phidias and the building of the Parthenon. 

She has sailed the Nile, the Yangtze, and the Wine-Dark Sea, ridden on donkeys, camels, and elephants, slept in a king's tomb, and survived several earthquakes and a hurricane. Her students have followed her into the storage room of Christie's Auction House and into museums in NY, Boston, Chicago, and Champaign. 

Her motto is:  dum vivo, ludo 'As long as I live, I play'.