
Dr Sophie Bocksberger is Departmental Lecturer in Classics at Oxford. A trained dancer as well as a philologist, she works on ancient dance theory, aiming to reconstruct how the Greeks understood dance as a medium of expression through an in-depth study of its vocabulary and practice-based research. She co-led with Helen Slaney the project Ancient Dance with Modern Dancers and regularly collaborates with artists (for instance, Le Marchepied, Flux Laboratory, Pipeline Art Gallery, Pierric Tenthorey, Mariel Manuel, Hugo Bonamin). In 2023 she gave the APGRD lecture Recovering Dance Literacy.
Sophie's first book, Telamonian Ajax: The Myth in Archaic and Classical Greece (OUP, 2021), combines philology, literature, ancient history, archaeology, and art history to trace the evolution of Ajax’s myth from the late 8th to the 4th century BCE through its reception in literature and art. The study shows how the priorities of art, cult, and politics could be negotiated through the re-configuration of a mythological figure.
- “Language and Literature,” in Cultural History of Dance series (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).
- “L’emploi du mot schêma dans le théâtre d’Aristophane,” in Corps acteur dans le théâtre grec antique, Cahiers du Théâtre Antique (CTA, forthcoming).
- Bocksberger, S. M. “Dance in Antiquity: An Outline of a General Theory.” Gaia 28 (2025).
- Bocksberger, S. M. Telamonian Ajax: The Myth in Archaic and Classical Greece. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.
- Bocksberger, S. M. “Dancing Little Bears.” In Religion and Education in the Ancient Greek World, edited by I. Salvo and T. Scheer. Mohr Siebeck, 2021.
- Bocksberger, S. M. “Narrative Dance: Imitating ēthos and pathos through schēmata.” In Choreonarratives, edited by L. Gianvittorio and K. Schlapbach. Brill, 2021.
- Bocksberger, S. M. “Dance as Silent Poetry, Poetry as Speaking Dance: the Poetics of Orchesis.” In Choreutika: Performing Dance in Archaic and Classical Greece, edited by L. Gianvittorio. BQUCC, 2017, pp. 159–174.