Born in Canada and raised in France, Marianne Govers Hopman studied at the École Normale Supérieure (Ulm), the École Pratique des Hautes Études, the Sorbonne, and
Harvard University. She holds a double doctorate
from the Sorbonne (Greek Studies, 2005) and Harvard University (Classical
Philology, 2005). Honors and fellowships include the 2005 graduate John J. Winkler Memorial Prize, a 2009 grant from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and a 2013-2015 AT&T Research Fellowship. Hopman is currently associate professor of Classics and a core faculty member in Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University.
Her research focuses on the modalities and pragmatics of storytelling in ancient Greece, especially in epic and tragedy. Her first book, Scylla: Myth, Metaphor, Paradox, investigates the relations between metaphors and mythical imagination in ancient Greece and Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2012). She has also published articles on Homer, Athenian tragedy, and Greek hymns, and co-edited the volume Choral Mediations in Greek Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Marianne Hopman’s teaching is closely
connected to her research and focuses on the three areas of Greek and Roman
poetry, Greek myths, and the reception of the Classical tradition. She
regularly offers lecture courses on “Classical Mythology” and “Poetic Genres in
Ancient Greece.” Upper level undergraduate seminars include courses on “The Iliad,” “The Odyssey,”
“Prometheus Bound,” “Myth and Context in Euripides’ Medea,” "Euripides' Iphigenia in Tauris, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” and “Metamorphosis from Homer to Kafka.” Graduate seminars include “Theoretical Approaches to Greek Myth” and “The Odyssey in the Twentieth Century.”