Ella Haselswerdt

I am an Associate Professor of Classics, having joined the department at UCLA in 2020, after two years as a Postdoctoral Associate at Cornell University and a PhD in Classics from Princeton University.  I work broadly in the areas of archaic and classical Greek poetry, with special foci on tragedy and the poetry (and cultural significance) of Sappho. My first single-authored book, Thinking with Tragic Chorality: Lyricism, Affect, and Anachrony in Greek Tragedy – which rereads three of our most canonical tragedies through the chorus and reception – is forthcoming from Oxford University Press in February 2027. I am also a co-editor of the Routledge Handbook to Classics and Queer Theory. In general I am devoted to critical readings that incorporate materiality and aesthetics while taking reception seriously as a mode of analysis. In recent years my work has been supported by a Loeb Classical Library fellowship and a Patrick Leigh Fermor House fellowship, under the auspices of the Benaki Museum, Athens.

I have published several articles that reconsider the materialist aesthetics and politics of Greek tragedy, including “Mythic Landscapes and Ecologies of Suffering in Sophocles’ Philoctetes” and “Bacchae’s Queer Hyperchorality”; my article “Sound and the Sublime in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus” was awarded the American Journal of Philology’s Best Article Prize. I was also awarded the LCC’s Rehak Award for my chapter “Sappho’s Body, Queer Abstraction, and Lesbian Futurity.” 

I am currently working on my second book, Deep Lez Philology, which weaves together contemporary art (and craft), textual criticism, queer theory, and queer archival studies to both critique and reimagine traditional disciplinary approaches to the text and figure of Sappho. This continues a thread I have been following since the publication of a public-facing essay, “Re-Queering Sappho”, in 2016.

I teach an array of courses in the Classics department at the undergraduate and graduate level, including ancient Greek language, tragedy, queer classics, and one of the department’s flagship large GE classes, Classics 10: Discovering the Greeks.

I am always happy to hear from students and others interested in Greek tragedy, Sappho, and queering the Classics.