Kale Coghlan

Sessional Lecturer

Campus

Areas of Interest

Greek geographic writing of the Hellenistic period; Hellenistic court literature, prose and poetry; interactions between Greek and Non-Greek populations and Greek ethnographic writing from the Archaic to the Hellenistic period; ancient and modern geography and cartography.

Biography

Following degrees in English and Classics (BA, MA) at the University of Calgary, I completed my thesis, Écrire le monde : le discours géographique à l’époque hellénistique d’Ératosthène à Artémidore, at Université Laval. During a postdoctoral SSHRC fellowship at the University of Toronto, I began to transform my thesis into a book, Eratosthenes of Cyrene: Writing the World into Being. I demonstrate how the Geography of Eratosthenes is a literary production whose carefully constructed, culturally contingent geographic persona creates a façade of objectivity interpreted by modern scholarship either through the history of Positivist or Enlightenment science. I explore how Eratosthenes communicates messages associated with Ptolemaic kingship ideology through his geography of the known world.

I have previously taught courses in Classics including Greek history, literature and language for Université Laval, Queen’s University, the University of Toronto, and last year at UTM.  

Education

PhD, Université Laval