Emily Varto

Education

• BA (Queens)
  
• MA (Dal)
  
• PhD (UBC)

Biography

I completed my BA(H) at Queen’s University with a major in Classical Studies and a minor concentration in Music History. I came to Dalhousie to do my MA in Classics and followed this with a PhD in Classics at the University of British Columbia in the department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies. During my doctorate, I combined interests in history, literature, and archaeology to study the culture and cultures of the ancient Mediterranean. My doctoral dissertation, entitled Early Greek Kinship, looked at ideas and expressions of kinship in the writing and material culture of early Greece (ca. 1000-450 BCE).

While completing my doctorate, I taught courses in classical civilization and classical archaeology at Corpus Christi College and the University of British Columbia. At Dalhousie, I teach courses in Greek language, mythology, Greek and Roman history, Greek historiography, as well as ancient art and architecture.

At Dalhousie, Dr. Varto teaches ancient Greek and Roman history, ancient Greek language, and ancient  art and material culture. She supervises undergraduate and graduate research in Greek history, art, and literature.

Research Interests

Ancient Greek cultural and social history, especially of the Greek Early Iron Age; Greek historiography; reception and the history of classical scholarship

Dr. Varto’s research on the ancient world ranges across topics in Greek cultural history and historiography, including genealogy, kinship, ethnicity, and politics, and draws on textual, poetic, epigraphic, and material evidence.

In reception and the history of scholarship, Dr. Varto researchs the classics in the anthropology of Lewis H. Morgan, ethnography in early classical archaeology, and the overall relationship between classics and anthropology from the 19^th to the 20^th century.

Current projects:

The Politics of Fatness in Archaic Greece (monograph project)

Three related works on ethnography and classics (Ethnographic answers to Homeric questions; Ethnography in early twentieth-century classical archaeology; The ritualists and classics’ estrangement from anthropology)

Transitional Grammar and Problem Sets for Reading Ancient Greek (OER)

Selected publications:

(editor) Brill’s Companion to Classics and Early Anthropology (2018)

“The Tinted Lens of Ancient Society: Classical History and American Experience in the Ethnology of Lewis Henry Morgan.” (2018)

“Kinship ‘In the Halls’: Poetry and the Archaeology of Early Greek Housing.” (2022)

“Bodyguards and the Entangled Values of Competition and Cooperation in Early Greek Warfare.” (2022)

“The Greeks and Others: Ancient Greeks in Their Mediterranean and Near Eastern Context.” (2021)

“The Idea of Descent in Early Greek Kinship.” (2016)

“Stories Told in Lists: Formulaic Genealogies as Intentional Histories.” (2015)