Scholar links Greek tragedy, new evidence on transmission of trauma

LAWRENCE — A University of Kansas scholar has won a fellowship from the National Humanities Center to work on a book drawing parallels between the rhythmic tropes of ancient Greek tragedy and cutting-edge scientific research on epigenetic trauma.

Sarah Cullinan Herring, assistant professor in KU’s Department of Classics, has been chosen to participate in the 2026 Select Summer Residency Program of the National Humanities Center.

She will spend June at the center, located in North Carolina’s Research Triangle, working on the book with support from the center’s research librarians.

Cullinan Herring said she intends to use the time to write the first two chapters of her book, with the aim of winning a contract for the full project from a scholarly press.

Like a bone-deep form of post-traumatic stress disorder, epigenetic trauma refers to evidence that trauma experienced by one person can be passed on to their offspring.

“Epigenetic trauma, just like any trauma, can, in theory, be healed,” Cullinan Herring said. “And one way that it can be healed is directly relevant to my study in Greek tragedy, and it is extremely unexpected. It is through poetry recitation.”

Cullinan Herring cites work by Dietrich von Bonin of the Swiss Association of Art Therapies, who, she said, “has done a lot of studies showing that performing rhythmic poetry ... is a lot is more effective at calming our parasympathetic nervous system and more effective at reducing symptoms of trauma than medication or talking therapy, which is absolutely wild. And the relevance of this is that tragedy was rhythmic poetry, which was performed in public in the heart of Athens.”

Thus, Cullinan Herring said, after fighting so many wars, the ancient Greeks “thousands of years ago were already onto this, even though they didn't know what a gene was. But they could see it happening in the community, and they were trying to do something about it.

“They were interested in the effects on the men, the soldiers. A lot of the texts deal with ... what happens to a man when he has to ... take part in atrocities, and then he comes back home. How do they reintegrate into the community?” she said. “The plays often explore when It's not successful, and the men are violent in the home context, or they can't reintegrate into peacetime community.”

And, as well, the KU scholar said, the dramas deal with the effects on subsequent generations.

“They go up against topics that we would see now as highly controversial — rape, sexual violence, incest, murder,” she said.

That is certainly true in one of the main stories Cullinan Herring plans to explore in this context, the tales of Clymenestra and Orestes.

Cullinan Herring said she looks forward to honing her scientific sources during the research fellowship.

“I think this is going to be kind of controversial from both angles,” she said. “I think there are people in the classical world who will see it as anachronistic to apply modern science to an ancient text in this way and who want to stick to the inherited-guilt type of moralizing, Judeo-Christian explanation for why these texts are so interested in these very controversial topics. And then there are also people who are extremely skeptical about the science. Obviously, I'm not a scientist. But I have to read and synthesize and pull in the right studies to show that there is really robust evidence for epigenetic trauma.”