Professor Stephanie McCarter Awarded Guggenheim Fellowship for New Translation of Ovid’s Love Poetry
April 18, 2025
Professor Stephanie McCarter
Classics Professor Stephanie McCarter has been awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on a new translation of Ovid’s Art of Love, Cures for Love, and On Women’s Cosmetics. The fellowship will provide McCarter with the opportunity to produce a metrically formal translation that explores the cultural, historical, and literary significance of these works.
McCarter’s award-winning translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into iambic pentameter made waves when it was published in 2022, as she became the first woman to translate the ancient epic into English verse. In her approach, McCarter integrates a gender-conscious perspective, particularly on themes of power, transformation, and agency, which has earned her significant recognition in the field. The Guggenheim Fellowship will allow her to build on this body of work with new translations that will bring ancient texts into conversation with modern audiences.
“These works reflect Ovid’s insights into the dynamics of love, beauty, and sexual relationships in the Roman world, but they also resonate with perennial issues of gender and power,” McCarter says. “The Guggenheim Fellowship will provide essential time and resources for me to delve deeply into the nuances of Ovid’s language and to illuminate these timeless themes.”
McCarter’s upcoming translation project is shaped by her belief that translation is never merely about converting words from one language to another, but always involves bringing two cultural moments together and reinterpreting ancient texts in the light of new approaches. Her work sits at the intersection of classics, creative writing, and gender studies, and she has become a leading voice in the field of feminist translation.
In addition to the Guggenheim Fellowship, McCarter is also a recipient of a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellowship for the 2025-2026 academic year. This fellowship, which supports scholars engaged in classical studies, will further assist McCarter in advancing her translation work by giving her the time and resources to examine the historical and literary contexts of these works.
McCarter is the third Sewanee professor to receive a Guggenheim Fellowship in the past 12 years. In 2014, Professor of Biology David Haskell was awarded a fellowship to support his work on Songs of Trees, a book that explores the relationships between humans and trees through acoustic analysis. In 2018, Professor of Photography Pradip Malde was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to further his photographic project on female genital cutting, a practice still found in parts of Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. His resulting book of photographs addresses the complex cultural and emotional impacts of the practice, contributing to his broader work on loss, sacrifice, and regeneration.
