Today we’re speaking with Leanna Boychenko, Associate Professor of Classical Studies at Loyola University Chicago. One of her main interests is Ptolemaic Egypt and the cultural and literary connections between Egypt and Greece. She has written a chapter entitled “Spawned from the Nile: Egyptian Monsters in Graeco-Roman Culture” for The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth.
Today’s guests are Camilla Asplund Ingemark and Dominic Ingemark, co-authors of several works about why ancient societies told stories about monsters. Their book Representations of Fear: Verbalising Emotion in Ancient Roman Folk Narrative (2020) explains how the act of narrating stories about monsters and other threats helps us to make sense of our lives and process our emotions: such stories can have a therapeutic power, providing a space for us to reflect on the difficulties and anxieties in our lives.