Mireille Lee
Assistant Professor
Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College
Greek Art and Archaeology

Curriculum Vitae

Mireille Lee is a specialist in Greek art and archaeology, with a particular interest in the construction of gender in ancient visual and material culture. Her current research focuses on the social functions of dress in archaic and classical Greece. Her book project, "Kalos Kosmos: the body, dress, and gender in early Greece," employs contemporary dress theory to analyze dress practices as they can be reconstructed from the visual, archaeological, and textual sources. She is also co-editor of a volume of essays on the body in the ancient Mediterranean (under review).

Bodies and Boundaries in Graeco-Roman Antiquity
Ed. by Fögen, Thorsten / Lee, Mireille M.

In the Graeco-Roman world, the cosmic order was enacted, in part, through bodies. The evaluative divisions between, for example, women and men, humans and animals, “barbarians” and “civilized” people, slaves and free citizens, or mortals and immortals, could all be played out across the terrain of somatic difference, embedded as it was within wider social and cultural matrices.

This volume explores these thematics of bodies and boundaries: to examine the ways in which bodies, lived and imagined, were implicated in issues of cosmic order and social organisation in classical antiquity. It focuses on the body in performance (especially in a rhetorical context), the erotic body, the dressed body, pagan and Christian bodies as well as divine bodies and animal bodies.

The articles draw on a range of evidence and approaches, cover a broad chronological and geographical span, and explore the ways bodies can transgress and dissolve, as well shore up, or even create, boundaries and hierarchies. This volume shows that boundaries are constantly negotiated, shifted and refigured through the practices and potentialities of embodiment.

ISBN 978-3-11-021252-5
Also available as an e-book.