About

Lauri B. Reitzammer is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Colorado at Boulder. She earned her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of California, Berkeley in 2006, and has also been an Associate Member at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens from 2003 to 2004. Her educational background includes a B.A. in Comparative Literature (French & English) from Brown University, graduating magna cum laude in 1995, and a M.A. in Greek from UC Berkeley in 2001. She has also completed a Post-Baccalaureate program in Classics at UCLA from 1997 to 1999. Her employment history includes positions as an Associate Professor of Classics at the University of Colorado, Boulder since 2016, an Assistant Professor from 2008 to 2016, a Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University in 2007-08, and a Full-Time Lecturer at Temple University in 2006-07. Her teaching and research interests focus on Greek Literature and Cultural History, Greek Religion and Mythology, and Classical Reception. She is the author of the book 'The Athenian Adonia in Context: The Adonis Festival as Cultural Practice,' published in May 2016 by Wisconsin University Press. Her scholarly work includes peer-reviewed journal articles on topics such as Euripidean choral odes, Medea, and classical reception, as well as invited publications and ongoing projects related to Greek drama, sacred sight-seeing, gender, and politics in Athenian drama. Reitzammer has also contributed to outreach articles, organized academic sessions, and delivered invited talks and professional presentations on topics related to Greek religion, drama, and cultural practices.

Research topics

• Literature
• Sociology
• Art
• Political Science
• Social Science
• Art history
• Anthropology
• Law
• Aesthetics
• History
• Gender studies
• Archaeology

Selected publications

• Alfaro's Mojada, Euripides's Medea, and Difficult Conversations in the Classics Classroom

  2025-12-12

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  In his essay, “Classics, Race, and Community-Engaged Scholarship,” Patrice Rankine describes the hope and exuberance he experienced as he listened to Luis Alfaro delivering his address at the opening session at the 2019 annual SCS meeting: In his SCS presentation, here was Alfaro arguing what classical reception theorists have been saying for years: that the classical “beats” (as he put it) of a given text … harmonize in unexpected ways with the rhythms of modern life and knowledge. Recognizing these beats brings understanding, on so many levels … Alfaro's Oedipus el Rey and his other adaptations help us to realize what guides our perceptions of the text and its meanings in the first place. Alfaro's adaptations encourage us in the direction of a deeper understanding of our contemporary world and what drives us toward particular texts and interpretations. This process unveils truth, so that we may know where we are and who we are, before we seek to understand the world around us and its past (italics mine). Approaching texts from a deeper understanding of our investments—emotional, cultural, and ideological—breaks down the gates of the stronghold of the Classics, the cultural, ideological, and emotional power the field has held. It helps bring us to a richer understanding. 1

  PublisherDOI

• Birds, stars, and <i>mousikē</i> : visions of escape in Euripidean choral odes

  Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies · 2023-11-27

  article1st authorCorresponding

  ABSTRACT In this essay, I discuss, as a group, moments when a Euripidean female chorus express a wish for winged travel elsewhere—the second stasimon of Iphigenia among the Taurians (1089–1152),the third stasimon of Helen (1451–1511), the second stasimon of Hippolytus (732–75), and the first stasimon of Bacchae (370–431). These choral passages offer lengthy and elaborate escape prayers that embellish the conventional wish to take wing or disappear, focusing on the idea of wings and travel as opposed to the idea of disappearing, and offering a bird’s-eye view of imagined expanses of land and sea. In Euripides’ plays, as I argue, female choruses who wish for release from their impossible circumstances offer surprisingly similar visions of escape. Again and again, they wish to return home (to an actual home or to a notional homeland) and they yearn for winged travel to places characterized by bands of maidens and female mousikê (song, dance, and music).

  PublisherDOI

• Re-Imagining Euripides’ Medea : Pre-Colonial Indigenous Elements in Alfaro’s Mojada

  The American Journal of Philology · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • History

  Abstract: This essay examines pre-colonial Mesoamerican elements in Luis Alfaro’s Mojada , highlighting significant differences between the recently published script of the play and a version produced at the Public Theater in New York City, which I attended in summer 2019, to argue that the Public Theater production questions whether Indigenous myth and ritual can persist and function effectively in the United States in the face of the brutal and dehumanizing forces of capitalism and racism. This essay contributes to discussions of the ways in which theatrical representations of Indigeneity function across different Latinx cultures and even different versions of the same play.

  PublisherDOI

• Ismene’s Hat: Sophocles<i>Oedipus at Colonus</i>313–14

  Classical Philology · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art
  • Literature
  • Art history

  In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, Ismene wears a broad-brimmed hat, a hat that is not normally worn by women or female mythical figures in literature or iconography. This essay suggests that Ismene dons this male travel accessory as she performs activities normally associated with the masculine sphere, namely, to travel alone on a horse, in secret, to convey information to Oedipus.

  PublisherDOI

• Oedipus’ lament

  2019-11-28 · 11 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter argues that the chorus’ collective lamentation with Oedipus in the kommos, a performance that revisits trauma, enacts the crucial work of integrating Oedipus into a new community. The setting of the grove at Colonus is of crucial import to Oedipus at Colonus, and nightingales play a programmatic role in this setting. The lament in Oedipus at Colonus integrates Oedipus into the community of Colonus, a function that lament—and more specifically, male lament—has the potential to serve in tragedy. The dirge at the end of Persians permits Xerxes to rejoin the chorus of elders who suggest that daimones have caused the disaster. In Oedipus at Colonus, Oedipus’ antiphonal lamentation with the chorus serves to create a new narrative concerning Oedipus. The fashioning of a distinct cultural memory is a function that laments serves in other texts as in the Iliad, where lamenters solidify heroic memory.

  PublisherDOI

• Sightseeing at Colonus: Oedipus, Ismene, and Antigone as Theôroi in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus

  Classical Antiquity · 2018-04-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This paper examines the appearance of theôria (sacred sightseeing) as metaphor in Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus. Once Oedipus arrives in Colonus, the local site on the outskirts of Athens becomes, in effect, theoric space, as travelers converge upon the site, drawn there to visit the old man, whose narrative is known to all Greeks. Oedipus, as panhellenic figure, serves simultaneously as spectacle and theôros (sightseer), attaining inner vision as he goes to his death at the end of the play. Oedipus offers salvation (sôtêria) to Athens within the logic of the play, but in order to confer benefits upon Athens, he requires the travel and vision of his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, who serve as supplementary theôroi. The essay concludes with a glance at outsiders-as-saviors in Oedipus at Colonus and beyond, with an emphasis on the contribution of female travelers to sôtêria in classical Athenian drama.

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• Antigone the Metic

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2010-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Aristophanes' Adôniazousai

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2009-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
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Awards & honors

• Loeb Foundation fellowship
• CHA Faculty Fellowship
• College Scholar Award
• Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence in Teaching Award
• CAMWS Award for Excellence in College Teaching 2018-19