Melissa Marturano graduated with a PhD in Ancient Greek and Latin Philology from The Graduate Center, CUNY in 2017. She is also a 2010 graduate of Boston University with a double BA in Ancient Greek and Latin and Classical Civilization. At both the high school and college level, Melissa has taught Classics in translation, science fiction, film, feminism, ancient history, modern receptions of antiquity, and the ancient Greek and Latin languages. She currently teaches in the Bard Early College network.
Feminism and music are among her passions, as are the city of Rome and science fiction. She resides in Brooklyn, where she is a (very) part-time singer-songwriter, advocates for better digital privacy for political activits, speaks Latin, and is a collective member of Books Through Bars New York City. You can find Melissa at her Blessing All the Birds, a blog dedicated to analyzing Joanna Newsom's music, poetry, and image from a feminist perspective, and can read some of her scholarly work on Ovid, feminism, and the receptions of ancient Mediterranean antiquity below:
- Dissertation: "Patterns of Sexualized Violence, Victim-Blaming, and Sororophobia in Ovid"
- Research into Female-Authored Inscriptions from Imperial Rome
- "Ovid, Feminist Pedagogy, Toxic Manhood and the Secondary School Classroom"
- Book Review of A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes
- Book Review of Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of Ancient Myths by Helen Morales
- Book Review of Women and War in Antiquity, eds. Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Allison Keith