Author Archives: Dr. Diane Fortenberry

Dr. Diane Fortenberry is a Mississippi-born, London-adopted writer, editor, and sometime archaeologist. Her interest in the collapse of civilizations has endured since before she wrote her PhD thesis on Mycenaean warfare, and continues apace. She has published widely on Greek and Roman archaeology, early travel, art history and photography, less widely as a poet and memoirist, and is working on a novel set in the American Deep South, ancient Athens and the London Underground. She tweets as @wisecynic when insomnia gets the better of her.

Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths, by Helen Morales

By Dr. Diane Fortenberry | Published September 1, 2020

“The danger of mythology—not just Classical myth, but all myth, from Norse to Japanese to African to Native American—is that it is so deep-rooted in the contemporary cultures to which it is ancestral that ancient social practices and preferences and justifications have become part of the DNA of modern societies—mutations that we think of (when […]

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Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

By Dr. Diane Fortenberry | Published July 14, 2020

“An ilbal is an instrument for seeing, a lens with which to view sacred relationships. In Native cultures it might comprise stories, traditions, ceremonies. Kimmerer suggests that science is the ilbal of modern Western society, through which lens we understand everything from chromosomes to galaxies. Science brings the material world into focus, but it blurs […]

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