IOS Panel at the SCS 2026 Annual Meeting: “The Ovidian Family” (in memory of Prof. Sharon James)

A signal contribution of the scholarship of Sharon James, whose career this event celebrates, was to realize the importance of women’s experience, in all its forms, not only as a subject of Ovid’s poetry, and Latin literature more generally, but as defining new perspectives from which they were read.  And by expanding our sense of how and to whom this literature mattered, her work has won new audiences for it today.

While much of her scholarship drew attention women’s sexual roles, as portrayed in comedy and elegy, James’ unpublished dissertation focused on the parent-child bond in the epic tradition.  The topic of the Ovidian family, therefore, at once reflects the range of her interests and provides a new context for advancing her approaches to the relationship between literature and lived experience.  It also highlights a pervasive Ovidian theme.  The family itself provides a defining context for women’s experience, but the variety of women’s roles in turn fundamentally redefines the family.  Rape, prostitution, and other manifestations of the traffic in women may seem antithetical to the ideal propagation of Roman family life, yet they also stand at its origins.  So Ovid’s poetry not only explores erotic negotiations in relation to marriage and reproduction but locates these explorations alternatively within the tragic families of Greek myth, the imperial family’s concern with succession, and the social ambitions and emotional realities that emerge from Ovid’s portrayal of his own family.

We therefore invite contributions that analyze how the lived experience and conceptualization of the family can illuminate, as well as be illuminated  by, Ovid’s poetry.  How does the poet’s portrayal of the family relate to other themes in his work?  Do his poems chronicle a period of transformation in the organization and agency of families?  How might the different kinds of families and family roles inhabited by his readers add new points of view for interpreting the poet’s depiction of a Phaethon or a Procne?  Where do Ovid’s accounts of family dynamics and familial aspirations resemble or react against those of contemporary authors?  And how do Ovid’s families live on in later literary and artistic representations and shape current conceptions of the Roman family? These are among the sorts of topics we hope to explore in this panel.

Panel Organizers: Andrew Feldherr (Princeton University) and Hunter Gardner (University of South Carolina)

"From family feuds to the pater patriae: Ovid's journey as a son in Tristia 4.10."

Cecilia Cozzi, Carleton College

"Mother Knows Best: The Authority of Cydippe's Mother in Heroides 20 and 21."

Isabel Ryder Cooperman, University of Wisconsin

"Ovid’s (Un-)Helpful Sisters? The Warning of the Danaid Portico"

Lien Van Giel, Columbia University

“Divine (Re)birth: Maternity, Mortality and Apotheosis in the Metamorphoses.”

Frances Myatt, University of Cambridge

“Daddy Issues: Proof of Paternity and Imperial Adoption in Ovid’s Metamorphoses”

India Watkins Natterman, University of Cologne

Invited Respondent: Heather James, Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Classics, University of Southern California