Just a few months before the pandemic hit, Malina Buturović began writing her dissertation, which explored theories of intergenerational transmission in the ancient world - the belief that various afflictions were passed down through heredity.
As fear and confusion around the spread of COVID-19 grew, Buturović began thinking more deeply about what it would have meant to experience those feelings at a time when there was no theory of contagion or understanding of person-to-person disease transmission.
"In the early days of the pandemic we were all living this object lesson in the ethical life of the body," she said. "You would go to the grocery store and worry whether you breathed on someone or whether they breathed on you because the consequences of those ordinary actions could be so dire."
The experience expanded her analysis of the ethical life of the body in the ancient world and helped shape her dissertation, which is now the basis for a forthcoming book. Buturović, who graduated from Yale College in 2016 and returned to campus as a postdoctoral fellow in 2023, is now an assistant professor in the Department of Classics in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
In the latest edition of Office Hours, a Q&A series that introduces new Yale faculty members to the broader community, Buturović sat down with Yale News to talk about ancestral curses, her undergraduate years at Yale, and her love of movies in which nothing happens.
Title | Assistant professor of classics |
Research interest | History of the body in the ancient world; ancient Graeco-Roman medicine and biology; overlaps between ancient medicine and philosophy |
Prior institution | Princeton University |
Started at Yale: | July 1, 2024 |
Tell me about your research.
Malina Buturović: I work primarily on ancient medical and scientific texts, but with an eye to how they can help us reconstruct richer, more textured understandings of what the historian Barbara Duden once called "life inside the body." What was it like to live in a body whose insides you imagine not as discrete organs, but as liquid? To identify your life with the "pneuma" (air) coursing through your arteries? To think that the heart is the seat of your rationality? These sorts of very fundamental beliefs and uncertainties about one's own body and one's physical world are spelled out most clearly in ancient scientific texts. But they must have played a major role in the poetry, theology, and philosophy of the ancient world as well. So, my writing crisscrosses between science and literature, to draw out their connections.
What made you interested in those connections?
Buturović: Ancient texts feature a range of creative, sometimes lurid accounts of how people inherit curses from their parents and grandparents: through nurture, through seed, because of the vindictive actions of an angry or jealous god, or (in one famous example) by way of blood-licking demons nourished in the womb. My doctoral research investigated the relationship between the ways of thinking about heredity and ancestral curse that you find in theological and literary texts and ways of thinking about the same questions in medical and biological texts. That's the story that my current book project, "The Transmission of Fault," tells. Across theological, literary, and medical texts, I suggest that ancient Greeks and Romans are thinking in convergent ways about physical and material mechanisms that transmit experience and suffering from the parents down to the child, as well about the justice of these inheritances.
Are you referring to physical suffering?
Buturović: All kinds of things. It could be character heredity - someone turns out to be a bad person because their parent is a bad person. But it could also be that you have some kind of illness or disability because of something that your parents or grandparents were seen to have done wrong. And you find versions of these ideas both in medical texts and in literary texts. The crossover becomes particularly clear in the first or second century C.E. world, a period often known as the Second Sophistic.
What got you interested in looking back at the ancient world?
Buturović: I had spectacular professors in the classics [during undergraduate studies at Yale]. I think the classics have a reputation for being a little bit pedantic, perhaps a little dry. But my professors were warm and enthusiastic and vibrant when they talked about the ancient world - they spoke with such familiarity about these remote objects, separated from us by vast distances. In my teaching, I try to communicate to my students just how much studying and thinking about the ancient world can change how you see the modern world - and that's in part because the experience of choosing to live in proximity to these very distant and remote objects will change you.
What do you like to do outside of work?
Buturović: I am really into modern and contemporary American poetry - I'm reading a lot of it right now. I also do a lot of outdoor activities. I really like ocean swimming, so one of the things I was most excited about in moving to New Haven is that I am about 25 minutes away from Hammonasset Beach [in Madison, Connecticut]. I like movies in which nothing happens. I don't like plot-driven movies; I like some combination of melancholy over failing utopias, expensive costuming, or impressive scenery.