Janet Downie
Position
Contact
Credentials
PhD (University of Chicago)
Area of expertise
Greek literature, literature and culture of the Roman Imperial period, environmental humanities, ancient medicine, cartographic humanities.
Interests and Areas of Graduate Supervision:
I teach interdisciplinary courses in Greek and Roman Mythology, Ecocriticism and the Ancient World, and Ancient Medicine. I also teach and advise students in ancient Greek language and literature of all periods and genres.
My research focuses on Greek literature and literary history, especially of the Roman Imperial period. I have published extensively on ancient rhetorical practice and theory, authorial self-construction, discourses of the body in the Greco-Roman world, and the rhetoric of religious practice and experience, including ancient hymnography and technologies of dream interpretation. My first book, At the Limits of Art: A Literary Reading of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi (Oxford University Press 2013) argued for a rhetorical reading of this unparalleled ancient first-person narrative of illness and divine healing. Ongoing related projects are concerned with: narrative and concepts of fiction in the ancient world; the dynamics of literary reception and canon formation in the Roman Imperial period; the relationship between rhetorical education and literature in post-classical Greek; embodiment and epideictic performance.
My other current research projects engage with spatial theory, concepts of chorography, and ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives in relation to imperial Greek literature. In 2025 together with Anna Peterson (Penn State) I published a co-edited volume Greek Literary Topographies in the Roman Imperial World in Bloomsbury’s Ancient Environments series, and I am at work on a monograph, Chorography in the Time of Hadrian, which uses the concept of chorographia to explore the heterogenous geographical perspectives of Greek writers of the second century CE. With colleagues in archaeology, geography, and early modern studies, I co-convene a research seminar on Cartography, Chorography and Literary Landscapes.
I am happy to supervise Master’s theses in any of these research areas and in any topics relating to Greek literature and literary history.
Select Publications:
Books
2025 [co-edited] Greek Literary Topographies in the Roman Imperial World. Janet Downie and Anna Peterson, eds. Bloomsbury Academic.
2013 At the Limits of Art: A Literary Study of Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi. New York: Oxford University Press.
Articles and Chapters
2026 “Imperial Cyzicus: Strabo, Tryphaina, Aristides.” In The Fabric of Hellenism: Hellenic culture and civic identity in the Imperial Greek world. Leventis Studies Series. Eds. C. MacIver and E. Bowie, 342-61. Edinburgh University Press.
2025 “Spatial Mnemonics in Dionysius and Pausanias.” In Greek Literary Topographies in the Roman Imperial World. Eds. J. Downie and A. Peterson, 46-66. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
2025 “Aelius Aristides’ Conception of Sacred Space.” Classical Journal 121(1): 82-107.
2024 [co-authored] “Chorography, Cartography and the Geo-Spatial Humanities.” Javier Arce-Nazario, Janet Downie, John Pickles, Tim Shea, and Toni Veneri. In The Routledge Handbook of Cartographic Humanities. Ed. Tania Rosetto and Laura Lo Presti, 27-37. London: Routledge.
2024 “Memory and Emotion in Philostratus’ Heroicus.” In Memory and Emotions in Classical Antiquity. Trends in Classics, Ancient Emotions IV. Edited by George Kazantzidis and Dimos Spatharas, 203-224. Berlin: De Gruyter.
2024 “A Misplaced Mummy: Thelxinoe’s Corpse in the Ephesiaka.” In Magic and Religion in the Ancient Mediterranean World: Studies in Honor of Christopher A. Faraone, edited by Carolina López-Ruiz, Sofía Torallas Tovar and Radcliffe Edmonds, 339-356. London: Routledge.
2023 “Chloe as Learning Subject in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe.” In The Reality of Women in the Universe of the Ancient Novel, edited by María Paz López Martínez, Carlos Sánchez-Moreno Ellart and Ana Belén Zaera García, 181-196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2021 “Symbolic and Chronotopic Space: The Ephesus Episode in the Acts of the Apostles and the Apocryphal Acts of Paul.” In The Apostles Peter, Paul, John, Thomas and Philip with their Companions in Late Antiquity, edited by Tobias Niklas, Janet Spittler and Jan Bremmer, 81-99. Leuven: Peeters.
2020 “Belief and Doubt in Aelius Aristides’ Isthmian Oration: To Poseidon.” In Sceptic and Believer in Ancient Mediterranean Religions, edited by B. Edelmann-Singer, Tobias Niklas, and Janet Spittler, 127-46. WUNT (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament), Vol. 443. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
2019 “Götterlob zur Zeit Lukians: Die Prosa-Hymnen des Aelius Aristides.” (“Divine Praise in the Time of Lucian: Aelius Aristides’ Prose Hymns”; transl. by H.-G. Nesselrath). In Griechische Götter unter sich: Lukian, Göttergespräche, edited by F. Berdozzo and H.-G. Nesselrath, 167-86. SAPERE (Scripta Antiquitatis Posterioris ad Ethicam REligionemque pertinentia). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
2017 “The Romance of Imperial Travel in Aelius Aristides’ Smyrnaean Orations.” In Journeys in the Roman East: Imagined and Real, edited by Maren Niehoff, 53-76. Culture, Religion and Politics in the Greco-Roman Period. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
2017 “The Experience and Description of Pain in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi.” In The Comparable Body: Imagination and Analogy in Ancient Anatomy and Physiology, edited by J. Z. Wee, 247-74. Studies in Ancient Medicine. Leiden: Brill.
2017 “The Geography of Empire in Dionysius’ Periegesis: A View from the Aegean.” Classical World 110.2: 163-86.
2016 “Palamedes and the Wisdom of India in Philostratus' Life of Apollonius of Tyana.” Mouseion 13.1: 65-84.
2014 “Galen’s Intellectual Self-Portrait in De Indolentia.” In Galen’s De Indolentia: Selected Essays, edited by Clare K. Rothschild and Trevor W. Thompson, 143-55. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
2013 “Narrative and Divination: Artemidorus and Aelius Aristides.” Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 15.1: 97-116.
2013 “Dream Hermeneutics in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi.” In Dreams, Healing and Medicine in Greece: From Antiquity to the Present, edited by S. Oberhelman, 109-127. Farnham: Ashgate.
2010 “Portrait d’un Rhéteur: Aelius Aristide comme initié mystique et athlète dans les Discours Sacrés.” In Perceptions of the Second Sophistic and its Times/Regards sur la Seconde Sophistique et son époque, edited by T. Schmidt and P. Fleury, 76-86. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
2008 “Proper Pleasures: Bathing and Oratory in Aelius Aristides’ Hieroi Logoi.” In Aelius Aristides between Greece, Rome, and the Gods: Proceedings of a Symposium at the Center for the Ancient Mediterranean, Columbia University, April 14-15, 2007, edited by W. V. Harris and B. Holmes, 115-30. Leiden: Brill.
Forthcoming Publications:
“The Rhetoric of Literary Form in Greek Writers of the Second Century CE.” In Rhetoric of the Ancient World (to 350 CE), Cambridge History of Rhetoric, Vol. 1. Eds. Henriette van der Blom and Harvey Yunis. Cambridge University Press.
“Terraqueous Landscapes and Deep Time in Aelius Aristides’ Orations.” In Terraqueous Topographies. Eds. Estelle Strazdins and Daniel Hanigan. Cambridge University Press.
“Kakoetheia in Aelius Aristides’ Literary Critical Program.” In L’Esprit critique dans l’Antiquité. Eds. Jean-Marc Narbonne and Anne-France Morand. Les Belles Lettres.
Courses:
GRS 200
GRS 304
GREE 301
Current Projects:
- Chorography in the Time of Hadrian. Monograph in progress.
In his Guide to Depicting the World, the second-century-CE mathematician and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 100-170 CE) made a firm distinction between geographia and chorographia – between quantitative and qualitative approaches to spatial representation. This distinction cast a long shadow in the history of European geographical thought; it has also influenced the story scholars tell about geography in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds: what counts as geographical knowledge? And what forms may it take? Ptolemy’s treatise is the only extant example of mathematical geography from the second-century-CE Mediterranean, but several contemporary literary texts address the representation of world-space in a qualitative, descriptive mode. Using Ptolemy’s concept of chorographia as a frame, Chorography in the Time of Hadrian examines four of these second-century authors: Dionysius Periegete, Aelius Aristides, Pausanias, and Arrian. Through a comparative analysis of the spatial language and spatial models at work in these literary texts, this monograph exposes a plurality of approaches to depicting world-space in the second century CE, in the time of the emperor Hadrian.
- “Pausanias’ Ionia.” Chapter in progress for Companion to Pausanias, eds. O. Gengler, W. Hutton and A. Patay-Horváth. Routledge.
Pausanias’ Description of Greece (2nd c. CE) offers readers a guide to the sights of mainland Greece organized by geographical region. Given this limited spatial scope, why introduce a mini-periegesis of the Asia Minor region of Ionia at the beginning of Book 7 (7.2.3-7.6.2)? What place does Ionia occupy in Pausanias’ conception of Greece? In this chapter I show that Ionia plays an important role as a cultural place in Pausanias’ networked picture of Hellenism. Closely connected with the deep history of the Peloponnese, Ionia is – more than a separate region – a haunting presence within the spaces of mainland Greece. In this sense, Ionia provides a key to Pausanias’ hermeneutic approach in the Periegesis – finding the past embedded in the present – and helps to explain what he means by ta Hellenica: a concept of Greekness that is transtemporal and geographically expansive.
- “Kairotic Speech in Aelius Aristides’ Epideictic Oratory.” Chapter in progress for volume on Time and Temporality in Imperial Greek Literature.