Ann Bergren


Ann Bergren was Professor of Greek literature, Literary Theory, and Contemporary Architecture at University of California, Los Angeles. She is known for her scholarship on Ancient Greek language, gender, and contemporary architecture.

Career

Bergren completed her PhD 'The poetics of a formulaic process: etymology and usage of PEIRAR in Homer and archaic poetry' at Harvard University in 1973 under the supervision of Gregory Nagy. Her dissertation was published as a book by the American Philological Association in 1975. From 1979 she was a member of the department of Classics at UCLA, and she was the first woman in the department to be awarded tenure.
She also developed an interest in architecture, and in 1999 earned a Masters in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She was a faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture.
A collection of her essays was published by the Center for Hellenic Studies in 2008.
She frequently taught in the summer program at B.A.S.E in the Caochangdi District, Beijing.
She gave a series of lectures on her project on the Liu Garden in Suzhou at the distinguished China Academy of Art in Hangzhou, China; she came in response to an invitation from Pritzker Award-winning architect Wang Shu.

Awards and fellowships

Bergren was awarded the Society for Classical Studies Awards for Excellence in Collegiate Teaching in 1988. In the same year she also received a UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. She was a fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C. in 1976-77.
She also commissioned prizewinning architecture: an extension to her home designed by Morphosis Architects constructed in 1986 won the 1986 National AIA Honor Award and the 1985 Los Angeles AIA Merit Award.

Selected publications