Interviews with the Author:
Born and raised in Florida, Jeanne
Reames counts Lakeland as
her hometown. She attended the University of
Florida (Go Gators!) where she majored in
English with a focus on creative writing. She
still harbors a certain affection for the state
because she knows it intimately, having been to
virtually every county except a few in the
panhandle, but doesn't miss the unremitting
humidity, crazy-big bugs--or Ron DeSantis.
Besides Lakeland, she's called Lake Wales,
Tampa, and Gainesville home at some point.
She went on to acquire two more degrees in
different subjects, albeit all in the
humanities. And it was while pursuing a Master's
at Emory that she first heard about this dude
called "Alexander the Great" and realized she
knew virtually nothing about him, but, given his
apparent importance, perhaps she should learn
something. This resulted in a trip to the Emory
library, where she randomly selected two
biographies. Fatefully, they were N.G.L.
Hammond's Alexander the Great: King,
Commander, and Statesman (his older, more
measured bio) and Peter Green's Alexander of
Macedon (the original Thames-and-Hudson
version with images). Two more different views
on the conqueror couldn't have been selected had
she tried, and she grew fascinated by this
complex figure who inspired such various
opinion. Never one to do things by halves (and
in that, maybe a bit too much like the subject
of her new absorption), she checked out book
after book, not only about Alexander, but also
about ancient Macedon, then began chasing down
various articles cited in the books. In between,
she was still trying to get a degree in a
different subject.
Fascination had turned to obsession.
How did she wind up a college professor?
Sometime during her second semester at UF, while
walking across the quad in what passed for a
cool Florida February (meaning the temps were
under 60 degrees), she decided that this college
gig suited her. She could spend the rest of her
life on a college campus. At the time, her
ambition was to become an English professor.
Certainly not a history professor, as
she'd hated history in high school and
assiduously avoided it in college. By her
Master's, she'd changed her intended subject,
but not her desire to become a professor. And
then....
Well, Alexander always was a conqueror.
Yet it wasn't just Alexander who enthralled her;
it was the entire country that gave birth to
him. As a child, she hadn't had much interest in
Greek and Roman myths, and like a lot of other
geeky kids growing up in the 1970s and '80s, she
fell in love with J.R.R. Tolkien and his world,
then was sucked into Science Fiction and Fantasy
(of which she remains a staunch fan as well as
author). That led to a pursuit of All Things
Celtic and Scandinavian. Greeks and Romans were
So Last Year. Ergo, she knew little about Greece
when she found herself dumped into Alexander's
world. And like Alexander, she entered Greek
history from the north. Thus, her view has
always been a Macedonian one.
Her applications to PhD programs were all to
schools and programs that would expand on her
already existing Master's, except ... except
.... A conversation with Judy Tarr goaded
her into picking up the phone to call Gene Borza
at Penn State, asking if she was insane for
considering a phud in history even though she
had no useful language nor any prior history
degree? He asked what she'd read, so she started
listing off everything, only to have him stop
her, laughing, and say, "You've already read
more than most of my current students!"
It was still a long shot, not only to be
accepted, but to be accepted with funding (a
graduate assistantship). Nonetheless, one
application went out to Penn State. She decided
to let Tyche (Lady Fortune) decide her fate.
Against all odds, Penn State
offered the funding. So in the summer of 1992,
she and her then-husband left sunny Tampa for
State College in Happy Valley, Pennsylvania, and
learned to drive in snow. 5½ years later, after
giving birth twice in 12 months (1 baby boy + 1
dissertation), she walked across a stage to be
hooded as a doctor of philosophy in, of all
disciplines, history! Somewhere, the ghost of
her history-loving mother was laughing. That was
December of 1998.
While at Penn State, she taught for both
Religion as well as Classics/emerging CAMS. In
2000, she was hired by the University of
Nebraska-Omaha for a tenure track position,
where she's been ever since. She's less a
husband, although they remain friends--which is
why you'll find her published work as both
Reames-Zimmerman and Reames. And her baby boy is
now a bearded young man almost six feet tall,
who makes fun of his little mother while
changing light-bulbs she can't reach.
Aside from teaching Greek history, she's served
as the History Department's Graduate Program
Chair, and with several of her colleagues in
various departments, started the Ancient
Mediterranean Studies Program, which she's
directed since its inception in 2014. Her
professional CV lists various
publications, conference papers, grants, classes
taught, and offices served, but that likely
isn't of great interest to readers of Dancing
with the Lion, except as proof she might
know something about Alexander and Macedonia.
Her most immediate next academic project is a
court study of Hephaistion and Krateros,
tentatively titled, Playing for Keeps:
Hephaistion and Krateros at the Court of
Alexander the Great. If she wrote on Hephaistion
for her dissertation, the 20+ years since
graduating has given her useful distance to mull
over prior conclusions, keeping some and
changing her mind about others. The ability to
change one's mind is necessary to
intellectual maturity. Her primary research
interest remains Argead Macedonia: e.g., the
kingdom up through the reign of Alexander. The
wealth of recent archaeological finds for early
Macedon gives new perspectives independent of
our limited textual evidence. Some even
challenges what we thought we knew, especially
about the sophistication of pre-Philip Macedon.
Will she continue
to write fiction? Yes, of course. She's working
on an epic fantasy series called Master of
Battles which borrows liberally from
ancient history but mixes up all the pieces
(Greece and Carthage never fell, Rome never
rose, nor did Macedon...until now, and oh yeah,
there are two
branches of humanity, one of which has a
handy prehensile tail). She's
also completed half of an SFF trilogy about
Dionysos and Ariadne, and hopes to return to
Alexander's story too. She's published short
fiction, "Indeterminate Creatres," Native
American Literatures: Generations,
2010, republished in Voices
from the Plains, 2018 ed., and "I
Choose to Fall Later," Red
Ink, 2013.
She lives in midtown Omaha in a neo-Tudor built
in 1936. With her son grown and on his own, she
shares her little house with a black cat
(Licorice), a tuxie (Cecilia Iphigeneia), a
Siamese (Kleopatra--after Alex's sister), a beta
her son named Herbie, and a feisty fox squirrel
who argues with her over who has rights to the
garden at what time of the day. In warm weather,
her front porch will be occupied by a key lime
bush named Cyrus the Great, because she's still
a Florida Girl at heart.
Images: Dr. Reames holding a sarissa,
photo by Dr. Graham Wrightson (whose project at
South Dakota State University created the sarissa
in question), and Dr. Reames in
Thessaloniki by the statue in honor of Manolis
Andronikos, who found ancient Aigai, photo by Ann
Haverkost. Dr. Reames at a reading at The
Bookworm, Omaha, by Angela Kroeger.
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