CAMWS is an organization for educators, students, and lovers of classical antiquity, promoting appreciation of the classics through its members’ teaching, research, and public outreach. The First Book Award is awarded to select CAMWS members for exceptional and thought-provoking first scholarly publications. 

Lauren’s awarding-winning book, Staging Memory, Staging Strife: Empire and Civil War in the Octavia, studies the anonymous historical drama Octavia and the interventions it makes in Roman historical memory. As described by her publisher (Oxford University Press): "Though Augustus and his heirs had claimed that the Principate solved Rome's curse of civil war, the play reimagines early imperial Rome as a landscape of civil strife with a ruling family waging war both on itself and on its people... Through an innovative combination of intertextual analysis and cultural memory theory, Ginsberg contextualizes the roles that literature and the literary manipulation of memory play in negotiating the transition between the Julio-Claudian and Flavian regimes."

Lauren received her PhD in Classics at Brown in 2011 (Dissertation: “Literary and Ideological Memory in the Octavia”). She is currently an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Cincinnati, where she has been since 2012. You can find more information about Lauren’s book on the Oxford University Press website.

 Please join us in congratulating Dr. Ginsberg on her outstanding achievement.