Milnor, Kristina

PERSONAL:

Education: Wesleyan University, graduated, 1992; University of Michigan, graduate certificate in women's studies, 1997, Ph.D. (classical studies), 1998.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Barnard College, Department of Classics and Ancient Studies, 219 Milbank, 3009 Broadway, New York, NY 10027. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Barnard College, New York, NY, associate professor of classics.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Rome Prize Fellow, American Academy in Rome, 2003-04; Goodwin Award of Merit, American Philological Association, 2006, for Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life; also received fellowships from American Council of Learned Societies and National Endowment for the Humanities.

WRITINGS:

Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Barnard College classics professor Kristina Milnor's interests include Latin literature of the late Roman Republic and early Roman Empire, feminist theory, and Roman social history. In her book Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life, she draws on texts from the early Roman Empire period to describe how women's roles under the Julio-Claudian emperors became politically, socially, and culturally important in the first century of the Common Era. "By examining representations of ‘femininity’ in texts," wrote Christina A. Clark in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Milnor "identifies something she calls ‘gendered Augustanism’ and defines as ‘a set of ideals and ideologies which on the one hand imagined themselves to be beyond the petty rise and fall of political systems, and on the other served as one of the fundamental building blocks of the new imperial state.’" In order to end more than a century of civil war in the Roman world, Augustus needed a new way of uniting Romans under a single form of government. At the same time, however, he both wanted and needed to maintain traditional Roman republican forms of government. By gendering Roman politics, Augustus found a way to recast politics in a cultural framework, thus overcoming the divisions that had split society for so long.

The language of the Augustinian gendering called on old republican models of female virtue. Augustus identified the ideals of virtuous women in his own family, in the persons of his wife Livia and his sister Octavia. Since women were acknowledged as wielding power in the private sphere (the home), and since Augustus maintained throughout his life the polite fiction that he was only a private citizen acting in the public good, women in general—and women of the imperial family in particular—gained political influence, based at least in part on their moral reputations. "One of the author's main goals is to explain the predominance of virtuous femininity in the moral literature of the Augustan age," declared Monica Bontty in the Canadian Journal of History. "Since the imperial family and domestic life became the focus around which civic life was constructed, [Milnor] next explains that the term private had many meanings and that at least one of them underwent a transformation," she added. "Examining the gendering of Augustan space by means of interlocking texts and structures—the porticoes of Livia and Octavia, Cicero's de Domo Sua, and Augustus' Res Gestae," wrote Clark, Milnor "argues that women had an important symbolic function in Rome's urban environment to mediate between domestic and civic ideals. Augustus' Palatine complex, and textual presentations of his relationship to it, [Milnor] asserts, ‘use femininity and female roles to make "domesticity" an imperial virtue, inseparable from the civic virtues on which Augustus is generally supposed to have built his auctoritas.’" "This is a well-researched work that makes very good use of the available literature and materials," concluded Bontty. She added: "The author's excellent philological skills, footnotes, bibliography, and index make this a valuable work for classicists, historians of ancient history, and those interested in gender studies."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Journal of Philology, winter, 2007, David Fredrick, review of Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life, p. 605.

Canadian Journal of History, spring-summer, 2007, Monica Bontty, review of Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus, p. 79.

Choice, October, 2006, J. de Luce, review of Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus, p. 351.

Times Literary Supplement, June 30, 2006, Matthew Leigh, "Nothing to Hide," review of Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus, p. 30.

ONLINE

Barnard College, Department of Classics and Ancient Studies Web site,http://www.barnard.edu/ (June 26, 2008), faculty profile of author.

Bryn Mawr Classical Review,http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/ (December 2, 2006), Christina A. Clark, review of Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus.

Columbia University, Archaeology Center Web site,http://www.columbia.edu/ (June 26, 2008), profile of author.