Erika Weiberg

Dr. Erika L. Weiberg researches and teaches Greek language and literature, with a focus on Greek poetry, gender and sexuality, and theory and reception. She received her PhD in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2016 and taught at Florida State University from 2016 to 2020, when she joined the faculty at Duke.

Their first book, recently published by Oxford University Press, is titled Demanding Witness: Women and the Trauma of Homecoming in Greek Tragedy. [Use the code AUFLY30 for a 30% discount!] Demanding Witness investigates how the trauma of female characters is represented and received in four Greek tragedies about homecoming: Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, and Euripides’ Heracles and Helen. Through discussions of modern trauma concepts alongside historical and literary analyses of these plays, this book examines how and why female characters’ expressions of psychological pain are hotly contested, silenced, and suppressed by other characters and sometimes by the plot of the play itself. By shifting focus to the returning hero’s wife and the women he enslaves, Demanding Witness calls attention to the detrimental effects of structural and chronic forms of trauma in addition to trauma caused by discrete, catastrophic events. This book argues that recognizing women’s trauma in these tragedies requires questioning how Greek society was organized through hierarchies that privilege the hero’s story of trauma and recovery to the exclusion of other types of stories and experiences.

In addition to multiple articles on Greek tragedy, Dr. Weiberg has also published on Ovid's Ars Amatoria, Anne Carson's translations of Euripides, and Sappho. Dr. Weiberg is also at work on a book manuscript that investigates how ancient Greek and Roman ideas of emotional trauma have influenced modern concepts of trauma, as well as how modern trauma concepts have conditioned contemporary understandings of ancient texts, from Homer and Greek tragedy to Galen. 

Curriculum Vitae