Kathryn Bosher

1974-2013

We remember with great affection the pivotal role that Kathryn Bosher played in the genesis of this comprehensive database of performances of Greek and Roman drama on Chicago stages 1840-today. As a graduate student in classics at the University of Michigan she was intrigued by the work of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at the University of Oxford. She appreciated the great scholarly, pedagogical and public history interest of collections of this sort, especially if they could be amassed on a grand scale. The development of our Chicago database was part of her scholarly research agenda.

Our database first got under way as part of a session on “Greek Drama in the Americas” that was part of a Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Theatre Outside Athens held at Northwestern in 2010 and directed by Kate.

Kate also inaugurated the Classicizing Chicago Project more generally. Her unique insight was that a robust collection of material about the uses of antiquity across various genres of cultural production and over time, but limited to a single city and its communities, could provide a window into the processes of classical reception and into some of the peculiarities of American history. She realized that Chicago was a spectacularly exciting laboratory for this endeavor.

Kate’s scholarly legacy also includes two edited volumes, Theater Outside Athens (Cambridge UP 2012) and The Oxford Handbook to Greek Drama in the Americas (2015), an article on Epicharmus in The Cambridge Companion to Greek Comedy (2012), and a monograph now being prepared for publication.