All Scholars

Jack Winkler was a leading interpreter of ancient Greek and Roman culture and an indefatigable activist for feminist, gay, and minority causes on college campuses. He died of complications arising from AIDS at the age of 46. His publishing career lasted barely a decade, but in that time he revolutionized several fields of classical studies and promoted a variety of feminist, anthropological, narratological, and theoretical approaches to the study of Greek and Latin texts. Winkler's work distinguished itself from traditional classical scholarship by its avoidance of a high-culture approach to ancient texts and by its refusal of an authoritarian or mandarin style of academic writing. He was interested in popular, marginal, and non-canonical literature, such as folk narratives, melodramas, magical spells, and dream-books. Even his interpretation of the more dignified literary forms emphasized the different meanings they held for various groups within the local communities which produced them. He read Apuleius' The Golden Ass as one might read a detective story, emphasizing the relation between the author's literary gamesmanship and the reader's opportunities for free play. He treated Athenian drama not as high art but as a social practice. He championed an ethnographic approach to Greek sexual conventions, seeking to demonstrate the limited scope and selective enforcement of Greek sexual morality and to document the element of bluff that accompanied many ancient pronouncements about what was natural and unnatural in matters of sex. He described how Greek women resisted or evaded the brutal pressures of ancient patriarchy and sometimes managed to claim for themselves and their lives a measure of actual or spiritual autonomy. Winkler was not only a scholar. He was also a tireless, intrepid, and effective political activist, especially for feminist and gay causes within the academy. While an assistant professor at Yale, he helped to found a women's studies program at the university and to organize a Gay Rights Week; he was also a plaintiff in a landmark sexual harassment suit filed against the university on behalf of women as a class. That suit helped establish the legal principle that the sexual harassment of women by men is a form of sex discrimination, and it led to the institution of anti-harassment policies at colleges and universities throughout the United States. Winkler was possessed of an almost magical presence, which led people who had met him only once and very briefly to remember him thereafter with vividness, affection, and even awe. His complete openness, his warmth, his charm, his personal humility, his courageous and unapologetic advocacy for his beliefs, his love of storytelling, his playfulness, his vast erudition, his total lack of pretentiousness, and his utter personal transparency are all manifest to varying degrees in his writing, whose power to enchant and enthrall is still palpable to those who venture within range of its magical spell.