Annette Harder

Marijke Annette Harder is a Dutch classical scholar, known above all for her work on ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period.

Biography

Harder was born in 1952. She was educated at Bogerman College, Sneek, and Menso Alting College, Hoogeveen, before studying at the University of Groningen, passing her doctoraal in 1978. She then spent a year studying papyrology at the University of Oxford with a grant provided by the Philologisch Studiefonds of Utrecht University, and held positions as a researcher at the at the University of Hamburg and as a research assistant and teacher at Utrecht. She obtained her doctorate from the University of Groningen in 1985, with a dissertation titled "Euripides' Kresphontes and Archelaos", supervised by Stefan Radt and Hugh Lloyd-Jones. She then spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at Groningen, before becoming a lecturer there in 1988 and a professor in 1991.
In 1992, she organised the first Groningen Workshop on Hellenistic Poetry, on the subject of the Hellenistic poet Callimachus. This workshop was then held every two years on a different aspect of Hellenistic poetry, resulting in a collected volume of essays published in the Hellenistica Groningiana series edited by Harder.
In 2005, she was appointed as a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Harder's most substantial work is a major two-volume edition with commentary on the Aetia, the fragmentary magnum opus of the poet Callimachus. Harder began working on this commentary in the 1980s, and worked on it until its final publication in 2012. The work received high praise from reviewers such as James J. Clauss, who described it as an "amazing work" which "will likely itself become a classic".
Harder retired from her Groningen professorship in 2017. The thirteenth Groningen Workshop on Hellenistic Poetry, held in that year, was a celebratory occasion in Harder's honour, and led to the publication of a Festschrift volume within the Hellenistica Groningiana series, titled Callimachus Revisited: New Perspectives in Callimachean Scholarship.