Elizabeth Minchin

Biography

Elizabeth Minchin is Emeritus Professor in the Centre for Classical Studies at the Australian National University (ANU). She was elected to the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2010 and is a member of the Classical Studies Section. Elizabeth was born and educated in Sydney. She attended Sydney University where she studied French and Latin. After completing a Dip Ed she taught French, Bahasa Indonesia, and Latin at Narrabundah High School in Canberra. While teaching she undertook further study in both Bahasa Indonesia and Ancient Greek at the ANU. Here she completed undergraduate studies in Ancient Greek and an MA thesis on the structures of Iliad Book 24. In 1989 she completed a PhD thesis, Aspects of the Composition of the Homeric Epics. Since 1990 she has held teaching and research positions at the ANU. She has taught Ancient Greek and Latin language and literature and social history; she has won an ANU teaching award and a national Carrick Citation for outstanding contributions to student learning. In 2001 she published Homer and the Resources of Memory and in 2007 Homeric Voices. She has also published an edited collection in her field and a number of journal articles and book chapters on the role of memory in the composition of oral epic: episodic memory, spatial memory, cultural memory, and the persistence of memory are all subjects for study, as are also the cognitive underpinnings of speech acts and of speech behaviour more generally and, a more recent research interest related to an ARC grant, memory in the landscape. Elizabeth is a member of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies (for which she was co-editor of the journal Antichthon for 10 years), the US Society for Classical Studies, and the Classical Association of the UK. She currently serves on the National Library of Australia’s Fellowships Advisory Committee.