Molly Levine (Professor & Acting Chair)
Office: Locke Hall 312
Phone: (202) 806-4159
E-mail: myerowitz@comcast.net

Dr. Levine holds degrees in Classics from Harvard (B.A.), Yale (M.Phil), and Bar-Ilan (Ph.D.). She has been a faculty member at Howard University since 1984. She has also taught at Bar-Ilan University and visited as a Blegen Research Fellow at Vassar College and as a Lady Davis Professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her current research interests are Roman Poetry, cultural diffusion and constructions, gender criticism, early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. She is the author of Ovid’s Games of Love (1981) and editor of The Challenge of Black Athena (Arethusa Special Issue 1989). Her other major publications include "Women Who Wait: Akiva's Rahel and Odysseus' Penelope," (1998) and "The Gendered Grammar of Ancient Mediterranean Hair," which was awarded the 1996 Women’s Classical Caucus award for outstanding scholarship.

Personal Statement
I am a classicist and that’s not only what I do, but in a real way who I am. I got hooked on learning about people and events from other times and places when I was 10 and sat goggle-eyed through a movie called “Attila the Hun” (NOT the recent TV special!) while the other two kids with me were busy sleeping. I still recall the moment in the film when the sign of the Cross appeared to Constantine on the Mulvian Bridge. At the time I had no idea that you could study such things in school. When I was 11, an aunt asked me what I wanted for my birthday. I said Homer’s Iliad. I didn’t really know what it was, but it sounded like something I wanted. She bought me the Modern Classic Edition, an archaic translation, but all 24 books were there. I read it and was hooked. And, thanks to you all, I get to reread the Iliad every year.

In 9th grade I got to take Latin. My teacher called me “sterling” and that was the end of it. I was in love, and to prove it I memorized the Latin book. Oddly, I have been living off that year ever since. I love the soothing mathematical order of a dead language with its untroubled declensions and conjugations that follow the regularity of a Bach fugue. Whenever I am upset, I translate Latin or Greek to calm down.

There were moments of weakness. I even toyed with majoring in English when I got to college, but the lines for English registration stretched way around the corner (Howard isn’t that unique!) and so I went over to my old friend, the Classics, where I found 4 professors holding their breath, waiting for someone like me to show up. I did my first two years at Wellesley College and cried nonstop. Mostly homesickness. I transferred to Harvard (it was still Radcliffe for women students in those days), where I smiled a lot and finished my B.A. in Classics. And then in a flash I was married, a mother, and living abroad, homesick again, but now washing dishes as I reviewed Greek principle parts from a chart that I’d hung over the sink. I studied Latin in Hebrew (not that much fun!) at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and then came back to Yale for an M.Phil degree and capped that with a Ph.D. from Bar-Ilan and a thesis on Ovid. At the same time I wrote lots of poems (in English!) and taught Classics while my two little boys went about the tricky business of growing up. I tried to emulate them. In 1983, I returned to the USA and have taught Classics at Howard ever since.

I love teaching smart kids like you who excite me and stump me with your questions. Know, too, that you can’t go wrong with me (and more importantly in scholarship) if you apply yourself with full seriousness and integrity to any and all worthy questions. That means thinking deeply, never parroting received wisdom because the glib phrases sounds good or seem to be what people (teachers?) want to hear. Never be afraid to back up and ask basic questions, think about definitions of terms, and in the process to complicate things. If all this means that you come to no positive solutions to the questions you’ve posed, so be it. That never scared Socrates and it shouldn’t scare you.