Carolina López-Ruiz
Professor
Divinity School, Department of Classics, and the College
Carolina López-Ruiz studies comparative mythology and cultural exchange, especially the intersections among Greek, Phoenician, and other groups throughout the first millennium BCE. Drawing on both textual and archaeological sources, her work produces a more integrated view of the ancient Mediterranean that transcends the barriers between Semitic and Indo-European languages and cultures that have been erected in the study of the western Classical heritage.
Her books include When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East (Harvard University Press, 2010); an anthology, Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths in Translation (Oxford University Press, 2014, 2nd ed. 2018), that integrates Near Eastern and Classical mythological narratives; and several volumes that consolidate and advance the field of Phoenician studies. Her recent monograph Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (Harvard University Press, 2021) pushes back against the Hellenocentric framework of much ancient scholarship and places the Phoenicians’ cultural agency front and center.
López-Ruiz received her BA-MA from the Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, after which she studied for a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and obtained her PhD at the University of Chicago in the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World.