Jenny Strauss Clay is famous for her work on Homer, the Homeric Hymns and Hesiod, with a focus on how these archaic Greek hexameter poems maps out an epic cosmos.  But today she will talk about a different kind of mapping, based on what has been labelled the “spatial turn” in Classical studies.  Her recent book, Homer’s Trojan Theater, exploits digital technology, cognitive mapping and mnemonics to analyse visualization in Homer, especially in relation to the Homeric battlefield.  (For the accompanying website to the book, go to: http://www.homerstrojantheater.org/.) She has continued in this direction with a new project investigating Homer’s Catalogue of Ships (Iliad 2) as a cognitive map, which promises to revolutionise the way we think about Homeric poetry and geography (http://ships.lib.virginia.edu/neatline-exhibits). But first of all she broaches the controversial topic of writing in Homer…

For those of you interested to learn more about the Jenny’s approach to the Catalogue of Ships, there’s a vodcast of her recent talk at the Digital Classicist seminar @Berlin here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKcQPLuCXHc

But first of all, click on the image below or follow this link to watch our interview.