Miriam Robbins Dexter
Research Scholar since 1998
mdexter@ucla.edu

B.A. in Classics and a Ph.D. in Indo-European Studies (comparative linguistics, ancient Indo-European languages, archaeology, and comparative mythology), both from UCLA. My doctoral dissertation, Indo-European Female Figures, along with courses I have taught (and still teach) at UCLA, in ancient goddesses and heroines, evolved into her book, Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book.

For thirteen years, I taught courses in Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit language and literature in the department of Classics at the University of Southern California. I am presently teaching in the Women's Studies and Honors Programs at UCLA.

In July of 2007, I gave an invited lecture on "The Degeneration of Ancient Female Figures" to a class at the University of Iasi, Romania. 

A longer-term project is a book I am writing with the Sinologist Victor Mair, on Eurasian erotic and ferocious female figures.  In this book I will translate texts from the Sumerian, Akkadian, Egyptian, Old Norse, Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit.  Victor will translate texts from the Chinese.  These female figures can be old or young; iconographically they give a sense of great power, and in the texts they are multi-functional.  They are wonderful examples of the multivalence of the female through time and space.

I am also co-editing conference proceedings for the Institute of Archaeomythology.

www.mariadracula.com.

Whence the Goddesses: A Source Book. Pergamon Press, Athene Series, 1990. Reprinted by Teachers College Press, Columbia University, Athene Series, 1992

I am the author of twenty scholarly articles and nine encyclopedia articles on ancient female figures. I co-edited an anthology of articles in honor of the archaeologist Marija Gimbutas, Varia on the Indo-European Past: Papers in Memory of Marija Gimbutas (1997), as well as a monograph of Dr. Gimbutas' own collected articles, The Kurgan Culture and the Indo-Europeanization of Europe: Selected articles from 1952 to 1993 (1997). I edited and supplemented the book which Professor Gimbutas was writing at the time of her death, The Living Goddesses (University of California Press, Winter, 1999. Paperback version 2001)