About Helen Ruger
This summer under the auspices of the Laidlaw Scholars Program I will be researching Hippocratic works and other texts from ancient Greek medical discourse in order to ask questions around female agency and challenges to the female body. How are female bodies governed? How are bodies feminized in medical discourse? If one can consider a body as an object from which forces of political, social, and psychological agency or governance emerge, how does a body’s female identity confound this? I am interested in how material bodies are formed and gendered, how they are a site of biological or social domains. It is through medical writings and interrogating perceptions of the ancient Greek body that one may more clearly understand what elements of the human experience are valued.
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Ariella Lang
Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Director of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, Columbia University
Popular Content
Please see below for the call for submissions for the Spring 2021 Issue of the Columbia Undergraduate Research Journal.
Research Poster: Reproductive Agency and the Role of the Female Psyche in Soranus' Gynaecology
Research conducted under the auspices of the Laidlaw Program durning Summer 2020; mentored by Dr. Brook Holmes at Princeton University
Graceful Giving: The Role of the Female in Seneca’s De Beneficiis
Hello! This spring I shared my Laidlaw Research at the Classical Association of the Middle West and South's annual conference, at which I won the Presidential Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Student Paper. Thank you Laidlaw for this opportunity! Here is my abstract.