the

Bosher  Collection

Initiated by the late Kathryn Bosher during her time as Assistant Professor of Classics at Northwestern, this archive includes records pertaining to projects in the performing arts on Chicago area stages that engage Greek or Roman sources (prose and epic as well as drama).  Organized  as a database, it is available in digital form to researchers, theater professionals and students.  We welcome expressions of interest in utilizing this material for scholarly and creative projects.  Please contact the director of CCP to arrange access. 

Plans are underway to make the Bosher Collection available as a searchable collection through the Archive of Performances of Greek & Roman Drama at Oxford University.  

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.

Rememberances