Dr. Erika Zimmermann Damer
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Profile
Dr. Zimmermann Damer’s research focuses on gender, sexuality, embodiment, and the urban environment in Roman texts. Her first book, In the Flesh: Embodied Identities in Roman Love Elegy (Wisconsin, 2019, and now available in paperback), examines the many forms of human embodiment in the elegiac poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, ranging from the poet-speaker and the puella, to wealthy rivals and the marginalized and enslaved, and argues that elegy constructs identities that influence shifting Roman ideologies of sexuality, gender, class, and status characterizing the emergence of the Principate. This project weds feminist new materialist thought with medical, legal, and philosophical texts contemporary with Roman elegy to see the human body as a necessary precondition for elegiac identities. Her second book, co-edited with Micah Myers, Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry (Routledge, 2021), explores how poetry spanning from Plautus to Ausonius is fundamentally shaped by its relationship to travel and movement within the geographies of the Roman Empire. She is at work on a new book demonstrating the ways non-elite Roman women shaped the urban fabric of ancient Campania and Rome.
Zimmermann Damer is also involved in an ongoing digital humanities initiative to digitize the Roman graffiti of Herculaneum and Pompeii with the Ancient Graffiti Project. This inter-institutional effort involves University of Richmond undergraduates in field campaigns in Herculaneum, Italy, and in ongoing research efforts with fellow ACS faculty leaders Rebecca Benefiel, Holly Sypniewski, and Jacqueline DiBiasie Sammons.
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Grants and Fellowships
2016. “Preserving the Past through Collaborative, Technology-Enhanced Pedagogy” Faculty Advancement Grant. Co-authored with Rebecca Benefiel, Jacqueline DiBiasie, and Holly Sypniewski. Associated Colleges of the South.
2014. “Engaged Learning and Interactive Pedagogy for the (Twenty-)First Century.” Faculty Advancement Engaged Learning Grant. Co-authored with Rebecca Benefiel and Holly Sypniewski. Associated Colleges of the South.
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Presentations
Selected Presentations
“Women’s Latin in the University Classroom.” Renaissance Society of America, Boston, March 2025.
“Teaching Women’s Latin in the Intermediate Latin Classroom, with scaffolding and embodied vocabulary,” FLAVA. Washington & Lee University. April 2024, with Mercedes Barletta.
“Resistance, Epistemic Injustices, and Feminist Epistemologies for Greece and Rome: a Response.” CAMWS, Provo, UT, April 2023.
“Ovidianisms in Martha Marchina and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.” Humboldt-Universität Berlin. Sustainable Ovid. Nachhältigkeit bei Ovid. September 2023.
“Elegiac and Erotic Embodiments in the Poetic Graffiti of Campania.” University of Cincinnati. Corpora et Cultura. The Body and Cultural Production in the Ancient Mediterranean. October 2022.
“Lucrezia Marinella, Boccaccio, Anna Maria van Schurman, and Canons of Exemplary Women.” First International Congress of Lupercal, “Pro mulieribus claris.” University of Lille, France. October 2022.
“Digital Onomastics: Naming the Women of Campanian Graffiti.” Feminism and Classics, Wake Forest, NC, May 2022.
“A Response to Propertius: Myth and Politics” CAMWS, Wake Forest, NC, March 2022.
Panel Organizer, “Carework and the Long-term Professional Effects of COVID-19.” NWSA Meeting, Program Administration and Development pre-conference, November 2021.
“Cynthia, Mimicry, and Slavery in Roman Elegy.” Wellesley College 2020. (cancelled due to COVID)
Workshop Organizer, “Responding to Harassment: Bystander Intervention (Workshop led by Collective Action for Save Spaces, D.C. Co-organized with Sarah Teets. SCS Annual Meeting. Washington, D.C. January 2020.
Panel Organizer, “Gender-Based Violence: Community-Building and Resistance Through Feminist Pedagogical and Artistic Practices,” with Mariela Mendez, Mari Lee Mifsud, and Patricia Herrera. NWSA, Nov 2019. Paper: “Transforming Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Gender, Violence, and Rome.”
“Mapping Women's Names in the Graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum,” New Research on Women in Campania. Villa Vergiliana, Cuma, Italy. Oct 2018.
“The Limits of Vision: Duplicitous Bodies and Bad Faith in the Amores.” Margaret Lowe Undergraduate Lecture, University of Virginia. March 2017.
“The Ancient Graffiti Project Workshop.” With R. Benefiel, H. Sypniewski, J. Di Biasie Sammons, and K. Helms. Ancient MakerSpaces Workshop. APA Meeting, Toronto. January 2017.
“Tibullan embodiments: slaves, soldiers, and elegiac vulnerability.” Tibullus the Idealist Conference, University of Manchester. June 2015.
“Body Talk.” Grinnell College Alumna Lecture. March 2015.
“Beyond the Elegiac Ideal.” University of Iowa. March 2015.
“Exploring Embodied Identities in Propertius and Ovid.” College of William & Mary. November 2014.
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Grants and Fellowships
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Selected Publications
Books
In the Flesh: Embodied Identities in Roman Love Elegy. University of Wisconsin Press. 2019, Paperback 2021.
Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry. Co-edited with Micah Myers. Routledge. 2021.
Journal Articles2023. “What is a Future for Classics?,” in Rethinking Classics, a special issue of American Book Review, edited by Paul Allen Miller and Jeffrey Di Leo, 44.3.
2021. “‘What’s in a Name?’ Mapping Women’s Names from the Graffiti of Herculaneum and Pompeii.” In Women’s Lives, Women’s Voices: Roman Material Culture and Female Agency in the Bay of Naples, edited by Brenda Longfellow and Molly Swetnam-Burland, University of Texas press, 151-73.
2021. “Competing Itineraries, Travel, and Urban Subjectivity in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria.” In Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry, edited by Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer, Routledge, 114-133.
2021. with M. Y. Myers. “Introduction. Traversing Empire.” In Travel, Geography, and Empire in Latin Poetry, edited by Micah Young Myers and Erika Zimmermann Damer, Routledge, 1-24.
2020. “Reading and Misreading. The Body in Bad Faith in Ovid Amores” 妇女与性别史研究, Historical Studies of Women and Gender 4 (Shanghai, China).
2019. R. Benefiel, H. Sypniewski, and E. Zimmermann Damer. “Wall Inscriptions in the Ancient City: the Ancient Graffiti Project,” in FromDocument to History: Epigraphic Insights into the Greco-Roman World, edited by Carlos F. Noreñaand Nikolaos Papazarkadas. Brill, 179-216.
2017. R. R. Benefiel, H. Sypniewski, K. Helms, and E. Zimmermann Damer. "Regio I - Latium et Campania: Fascicolo III - Pompeii et Herculaneum: Graffiti," Italia Epigrafica Digitale, vol. II.3 (2017) 856 pp.
2016. “The Herculaneum Graffiti Project, First Field Season 2014.” R. Benefiel, J. DiBiasie, H. Sypniewski, E. Zimmermann Damer, K. Helms, M. Loar, K. Lundquist, F. Opdenhoff. Journal of Fasti Online.
2016. “Iambic Metapoetics in Epodes 8 and 12.” Helios43: 55 -85.
2014. Editor of “Recent Work on Tibullus.” a special issue of Classical World 107.4. Introduction, 443-450.
2014. “Gender Reversals and Intertextuality in Tibullus.” Classical World107.4, 493-514.
Book Chapters2024. “Dido to Aeneas,” Ovid’s Heroides. Translation, with introduction and notes. In Women in Power: Classical Myths and Stories from the Amazons to Cleopatra, edited by Stephanie McCarter. Penguin Classics, 205-214.
2023. “Religious Authority and Classical Reception. Martha Marchina’s Musa Posthuma and Baroque epistemologies.” Ch. 14 in Believing Ancient Women: Feminist Epistemologies for Greece and Rome, edited by Megan Bowen, Mary Gilbert, and Gwen Nally, Edinburgh University Press, 242-261.Additional Publications2014-ongoing. Dr. Damer is an active contributor to the Epigraphic Database Roma, and has published wall inscriptions and drawn wall inscriptions from Herculaneum and Pompeii.
2020. Review of Nandini Pandey. The Poetics of Power in Augustan Rome: Latin Poetic Responses to Early Imperial Iconography. Vergilius (2020) 66: 191 -94.
2019. Review of Laurel Fulkerson. A Literary Commentary on the Elegies of the Appendix Tibulliana, BMCR.
2018. “Stoa.” C. Smith, ed. The Encyclopedia of Classical Archaeology. 2nd Edition. Springer, New York, 7056-7062.
2012. Review of T. Johnson. Horace’s Iambic Poetics. Casting Blame. Classical Journal Online.
2011. Review of Ryan and Perkins. Ovid’s Amores. Book One. A Commentary. BMCR.