About

Sara H. Lindheim is a Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She earned her undergraduate degree in Classics at Amherst College and her graduate degree in Classics at Brown University. Her research primarily focuses on Latin poetry of the Augustan Age, with particular attention to gender and psychoanalytic theory. Her first book, Mail and Female: Epistolary Narrative and Desire in Ovid's Heroides, explores the representation of feminine desire through poetic letters from heroines of ancient myth and literature to the heroes who have abandoned them. Her second book, Latin Elegy and the Space of Empire, examines how Latin elegiac poetry, from Catullus to Ovid's exilic epistles, engages with themes of space, empire, and the consolidation of power during the late Republic and under Augustus. She is also a co-editor and contributor to The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory. Lindheim welcomes inquiries from prospective students interested in Latin poetry, gender studies, psychoanalysis, queer theory, and the intersections of geography, empire, and literature.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Art
• History
• Gender studies
• Classics
• Art history

Selected publications

• MONICA R. GALE &amp; ANNA CHAHOUD (Eds), The Augustan Space: The Poetics of Geography, Topography and Monumentality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp xiii + 263. <scp>isbn</scp> 978-1009176071 (hbk), £85.00. 9781009176088 (pbk). 9781009176064(ebook) doi: 10.1017/9781009176064

  The Journal of Roman Studies · 2026-01-23

  article1st authorCorresponding

  MONICA R. GALE &amp; ANNA CHAHOUD (Eds), The Augustan Space: The Poetics of Geography, Topography and Monumentality. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. Pp xiii + 263. isbn 978-1009176071 (hbk), £85.00. 9781009176088 (pbk). 9781009176064(ebook) doi: 10.1017/9781009176064

  PublisherDOI

• Elegy, Queerness, and the Lacanian Death Drive

  2025-01-01

  other1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• General Introduction

  2023-08-31

  book-chapter

  The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the very start. That is, when queer theory came into its own, as an approach with means and aims different to those of the history of sexuality, its leading practitioners were engaged in conversation with Classicists who were working, in various ways, on sexual practice and sexual identity in the ancient world. Teresa de Lauretis first coined the term “queer theory” in 1990 in order, as she explains, to trouble the “homogenization” of “gay and lesbian studies,” as well as to find ways of thinking about the interrelation of sexuality and race; her goal was “to construct another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual”. “Queer Kinships” is a category that people did not originally conceive of or designate for contributors, but it is one that clearly emerged and asserted itself as the contributions rolled in.

  PublisherDOI

• Queerly Beloved

  Routledge eBooks · 2023

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Art

  This chapter examines the relationship between the lover and Nemesis in Tibullus’ second book of elegies through the lens of queer temporalities. The affair, characterized by iteration and temporal suspension, stands in marked contrast to the heteronormative reproductive futurity on offer to the other erotic couples in the book. Indeed, when he seeks to describe his entanglement with Nemesis, the lover reaches for points of comparison with queer relationships, between the lover and his beloved Marathus, between the god Apollo and the human Admetus, neither of which participates in “straight time.” In the last poem of the collection, the lover finally seems to imagine a possible movement forward, as he divulges a hope for a next phase with Nemesis. This chapter concludes with a consideration of this potential future with the help both of Edelman’s anti-social theory that demands no futurity as well as of Muñoz’s utopian notion of queer futurity.

  PublisherDOI

• The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 16 citations

  • Sociology
  • Sociology
  • Art

  "New directions in queer theory continue to trouble the boundaries of both queerness and the classical, leading to an explosion of new work in the vast - and increasingly uncharted - intersection between these disciplines, which this interdisciplinary volume seeks to explore. This handbook convenes an international group of experts who work on the classical world and queer theory. The discipline of Classics has been involved with, and implicated in, queer theory from the start. By placing front and center the rejection of heteronormativity, queer theory has provided Classics with a powerful tool for analyzing non-normative sexual and gender relations in the ancient West, while Classics offers queer theory ancient material (such as literature, visual arts, and social practices) that challenges a wide range of modern normative categories. The collection demonstrates the vitality of this particular moment in queer classical studies, featuring an expansive array of methodologies applied to the interdisciplinary field of Classics. Embracing the indeterminacy that lies at the core of queer studies, the essays in this volume are organized not by chronology or genre, but rather by overlapping categories under the following rubrics: queer subjectivities, queer times and places, queer kinships, queer receptions, and ancient pasts / queer futures. The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory offers an invaluable collection for anyone working on queer theory, especially as it applies to premodern periods; it will also be of interest to scholars engaging with the history of sexuality, both in the ancient world and more broadly"--

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction

  2021-03-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The introduction provides an overarching view of the book’s questions, texts, and theoretical concerns. It moves from a concrete detailing of the physical extent of geographical space the Roman empire added in the late Republic and in the Augustan age to a consideration of the effects that such an expansive increase in territory might have on a people’s worldview, relying on theories of cartography and the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan in conjunction with questions about how Romans conceptualized their world and what light the (no-longer-extant) late first-century bce or early first-century ce map of Agrippa can shed on it. The emphasis of the inquiry is on the subject in Latin elegy (including Catullus) in poems that turn out to be chock full of geographical references. The book traces the different ways in which, and the varying consequences with which, the elegiac subject encounters the space of empire depending on gender in the works of Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid.

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• Dedication

  2021-03-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Subject Classical Literature Collection: Oxford Scholarship Online

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Sine finibus</i>

  2021-03-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This chapter juxtaposes Ovid’s erotic and his exilic elegy. In Rome people could visit and examine Agrippa’s map; expansion and conquest sit hand in glove with powerful fantasies of imposing order, control, and hierarchy. In his early elegiac works Ovid contemplates feminine self-adornment. Luxury goods from foreign places flow to the capital, and the city’s female inhabitants seek out, then display on their bodies, the commodities of empire. Once the Ovidian women cloak themselves in the trappings of empire, however, they become one with their accoutrements. In the second part of the diptych, exilic Ovid, just like his adorned women before him, suffers in the face of absent fines. At the very margins of empire, in Tomis on the Black Sea, when he finds himself contemplating first-hand the permeable fines at the furthest edge of imperium, stable, fixed boundaries evaporate, and hybridization and melange take over. It becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain where imperium ends and the non-Roman world (not-yet-Roman world) begins. The Greeks, the Getans, the barbarians have already mixed together, and ultimately even the one Roman cannot sustain his Romanness.

  PublisherDOI

• What’s Love Got To Do With It?

  2021-03-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Octavian/Augustus, following in the footsteps of both Pompey and Caesar, relentlessly pursues territorial expansion abroad, while at home he presents the Roman people with the image of himself as unstoppable expansionist. In one otherwise unprepossessing poem Propertius makes a strikingly romantic assertion: Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit (1.12.20). The word choice—finis—gives pause, especially when this particular elegy (1.12) and the ones with which Propertius surrounds it (1.8a, 1.8b, and 1.11) emphasize geographical space. To be more precise, they focus on Cynthia’s propensity to move through geographical space, away from the Propertian amator. Anxieties emerge from Propertius’ elegies when he imagines the individual faced with an infinite and ever-changing world. The Propertian amator struggles to establish and cling to the possibility of known and definable boundaries. He seeks to render Cynthia his finis and to anchor his self-definition to her.

  PublisherDOI

• <i>Sine fine</i>

  2021-03-11

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract Catullus’ poetry reveals an acute awareness of the constant and almost unfathomable widening of his world in the late Roman Republic. In his work people and goods circulate with ease through geographical space, impervious to boundaries. But the cultural notion that only the ends of the world impose limits on Roman territory takes its toll, especially at the level of the subject. The porous nature of geographical boundaries seems to rub off onto the signifiers by which Catullus constructs himself, Lesbia, his brother, his friends, enemies and acquaintances, as well as the places they move through, as coherent, unified, fixed entities.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Ella Haselswerdt

  2 shared

• Kirk Ormand

  2 shared