Santa Clara University

Jody Rubin-Pinault, Ph.D

Lecturer (Academic Quarter)

Jody Pinault received her B.A. in English and Latin from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. and Ph.D in Classical Studies from the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has taken ancient medicine as a starting point to explore Greek and Roman ideas about the body, sexuality, illness and health, food and diet, and beauty and deformity, as well as the formation of literary legends and pseudepigrapha. In her investigations, she has traced some of these ideas from the fifth century B.C.E. down through the Christian and Islamic eras and into the early modern era, focusing on the Mediterranean. In her courses she enjoys taking students on intellectual journeys, delving into ideas (for example, the afterlife) from the beginning of Western literature (in the Gilgamesh epic), through the classical canon, and then contemplating the reception of these ideas in later writers, such as Dante and Galileo.

Teaching:
RSOC 159 Longings for Immortality: Imagining the Afterlife from Gilgamesh to Cyberspace

Selected Publications: (for a complete list, access CV here)
“Women, Fat, and Fertility,” in Women’s Power, Man’s Game: Essays on Classical Antiquity in Honor of Joy King, ed. Mary DeForest, pp. 78-90. Wauconda, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, 1993.

Hippocratic Lives and Legends. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992.

“The Medical Case for Virginity in the Early Second Century C.E.: Soranus of Ephesus, Gynecology I.32,” Helios 19 (1992) 123-139.

“How Hippocrates Cured the Plague,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 41 (1986) 52-75.

“Decircumcision in Celsus: Some Medical and Historical Implications,” Urology 16 (1980) 121-124.