Dr. Alexandra Schultz

Alexandra Schultz is an assistant professor of Classics at Dartmouth College. She specializes in ancient Greek literature and in the cultural and intellectual history of Greco-Roman antiquity. Her current book project, The Mirage of Alexandria, argues that the modern understanding of ancient libraries is the product of over two millennia of mythmaking. By radically rewriting the history of libraries in Greco-Roman antiquity and tracking down the origins of popular legends about the Library of Alexandria, she demonstrates how communities from classical antiquity to today have used libraries, and stories about libraries, to articulate their relationship to the past. Schultz has also written about the participation and exploitation of enslaved persons in the history of Roman text collections; anecdotes about plundered libraries as a means of articulating elite Roman identity; and how a feminist and philological reading of Sappho's poetry reveals the poet's interest in women's agency.