Personal Biography
I was trained both in Classics (BA Cambridge) and in European and Comparative Literature (MPhil Cambridge, DPhil Oxford). From 2003-2014 I taught in the Classics Department at Princeton University where I was also affiliated with the Program in Hellenic Studies. I am Professor of Greek Literature and E.P. Warren Praelector at Corpus Christi College.
Research and Teaching
My main research interests lie in the field of antiquity after antiquity, and in questions of the disciplinary shape of Classics: why, and how, do classicists ask the questions they ask? My most recent book, Feeling and Classical Philology: Knowing Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Germany, 1790-1920 (Cambridge UP, 2020) looks at the rhetorical strategies and organizing metaphors of German classical scholarship. I have been lucky to work with a number of colleagues on the book project Postclassicisms(Chicago, 2019), jointly authored under the name The Postclassicisms Collective. In the future I intend to continue work on historical and philosophical questions of reading and interpreting, and on transnational aspects of scholarship, asking what happens to classical knowledge when it migrates between places and contexts. I teach a wide range of topics and genres in Greek literature (tragedy, comedy, epic, philosophical dialogue, ancient biography) and their afterlife, as well as Modern Greek literature and culture.
Selected Publications
Placing Modern Greece. The Dynamics of Romantic Hellenism, 1770-1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
Studying Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Classical Scholarship and the Language of Attachment, 1790-1920 (completed; Cambridge University Press, to appear in its series Classics After Antiquity, 2019)
‘‘For time is / nothing if not amenable’: Time, Exemplarity, and Reception’, Classical Receptions Journal 12.1 (2020)
‘Philology’s Roommate: Hermeneutics, Rhetoric, and the Seminar’, in Philology’s Shadow: Philology and Theology, ed. C. Conybeare and S. Goldhill (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming)
‘Postclassicism, Disturbed Philology, and Kleist’s Fencing Bear’, Oxford German Studies 47.2 (2018), 184-200
'After Exemplarity. A Map of Plutarchan Scholarship', in The Afterlife of Plutarch, ed. P. Mack and J. North, BICS Supplement (2018)
‘Introduction: ‘A Mirror does not develop…’: The History of Classical Scholarship as Reception’, C. Stray, Classics in Britain: Scholarship, Education, and Publishing 1800-2000 (Oxford University Press, 2018), 1-9
'Hyperinclusivity, Hypercanonicity, and the Future of the Field' (with Brooke Holmes), in Canonicity, Marginality, Passion, ed. M. Formisano and C. Kraus (Oxford University Press, 2018), 57-73
‘Warum Boeckhs Encyclopädie lesen?’, Geschichte der Germanistik. Historische Zeitschrift für die Philologien 51/52 (2017), 83-97
‘Neutrality’, in Liquid Antiquity, ed. B. Holmes (Athens: DESTE Foundation, 2017), 171-173
'"Lives" as Parameter. The privileging of ancient lives as a category of research around 1900', in R. Fletcher and J. Hanink (eds), Creative Lives. New Approaches to Ancient Intellectual Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 29-48
‘Das Erkennen des Einzelnen. August Boeckhs Symphilologie’, in S. Stockhorst, M. Lepper, V. Hoppe (eds), Symphilologie. Formen der Kooperation in den Geisteswissenschaften (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck 2016), 183-200