Patti Miller (English Composition and Applied Linguistics doctoral candidate) recently published an article in Peitho (winter 2025) titled “Nevertheless, She Resisted: Feminist Ethos and Agency in ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’.”
This article began in Matthew Vetter’s Rhetorical Traditions class and was further developed in Dana Driscoll’s Writing for Publication course.
Miller’s study is a forensic social anthropology that reconstructs the ethos of ancient women in the world’s first epic. It proposes a new rhetoric that examines the negative space occupied by female characters around and between the central male characters in texts written by men and argues that scholars can reconstruct the ethos of women in ancient cultures even through texts that were written by men and for a culture that valorized masculine values.
The article can be read and downloaded at the journal’s website.