Dr. Ella Haselswerdt

Biography

Ella Haselswerdt joined the faculty at UCLA in 2020 after completing her postdoctoral fellowship at Cornell University. She earned her Ph.D. from Princeton University and her Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts from Sarah Lawrence College, with post-baccalaureate studies at Columbia University. Her research interests encompass the ancient Greek poetics and aesthetics and their reception, exploring the interplay between tragedy, trauma, and the choral subjectivity in her current book project titled 'Epistemologies of Suffering'. This work argues that tragedy utilizes formal fluidity and lyric expression to convey meaning in the context of extreme violence and intimacy. Haselswerdt has published on the dreamscapes of the ancient Greco-Roman body, alongside the sublime soundscapes of Sophocles' 'Oedipus Colonus'. Her forthcoming projects investigate poetry through the lens of Anne Carson's work, and the mythic landscape of Philoctetes, as well as Euripides' 'Iphigenia in Aulis' in relation to queer liberation. A significant part of her research is focused on the intersection of classical antiquity with queer theory and queer identity, particularly with regards to Sappho and contemporary art. At UCLA, she teaches ancient Greek language, literature, and culture at both the graduate and undergraduate levels, offering courses on tragedy, sex, gender, and a large general education lecture course titled 'Classics 10: Discovering Greeks'.

Research Interests