Marie-Claire Beaulieu

Marie-Claire Beaulieu is an associate professor of Classical Studies at Tufts University. She has received her PhD. from the University of Texas at Austin (2008), and her MA and BA from the Université de Montréal (2003 and 2001). Her major research areas are Greek mythology and digital humanities and she teaches complete sequence of courses on Greek mythology and its later incarnations in medieval, early modern, and contemporary literature and popular culture.

In her publications, Prof. Beaulieu studies the interactions between culture, religion, and the human experience of the natural world. Her book The Sea in the Greek Imagination (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) explores the Greek representation of the sea as a cosmological space of transition between the living, the dead, and the gods. She has recently led a team of international scholars in publishing a collection of essays titled A Cultural History of the Sea in Antiquity, part of the broader Cultural History of the Sea series (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her current project, in collaboration with a team of experts from the humanities, computer science, and the biological sciences, is a digital edition of D'Arcy Thompson Glossary of Greek Birds (https://sites.tufts.edu/ancientbirds/). The project leverages technology and science to analyze the significance of birds in Greek mythology.

With the Perseids Project (https://www.perseids.org/), Prof. Beaulieu has engaged in large infrastructure-building initiatives in the digital humanities, designing collaborative editing and annotation software. She has also engaged extensively in interdisciplinary teaching, in particular with the Department of Computer Science, and her classes make frequent use of technology to involve students in the process of research. In general, Prof. Beaulieu is interested in using the digital medium to foster greater engagement with the ancient world through the study of language, art, and culture.