Yopie Prins

Areas of research: Greek literature and classical reception studies; comparative poetics, lyric theory, and nineteenth-century historical poetics; critical translation studies 

Languages: Dutch (native), German, French, Ancient Greek, Latin

Yopie Prins received the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 1991, and is currently Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (2017) and co-editor of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (2014), Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (1997), and a special issue of Cultural Critique on “Classical Reception and the Political” (2010). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and studied abroad as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Amsterdam and as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University. She has served as President and Vice President of the American Comparative Literature Association and as member of advisory boards for the English Institute, for the MLA Victorian Division, for the MLA Discussion Group on Classical Studies and Modern Literature,  and for APA Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception. As a founding member of Contexts for Classics at Michigan, she regularly coordinates lectures and events related to classical reception, and she has taught related courses such as "Women Writers and Classical Myth," "Sappho and the Lyric Tradition," and a graduate seminar, "Classical Translations, Translating Classics."    

Selected publications in classical reception studies:

• Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
• Victorian Sappho. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
• “Sapphic stanzas: How can we read the rhythm?" In Critical Rhythm, ed. Benjamin Glaser and Jonathan Culler. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018.
• "A Virtual Conversation with Anne Carson about Greek Tragedy." In The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, ed. Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Patrick Rankine.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 
• "Translating Greek Tragedy: Robert Browning's Greek Decade." In The Oxford History fo Classical Reception in English Literature, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 
• "The Sexual Politics of Translating Prometheus Bound." In Cultural Critique 74 (Winter 2010).
• “Classics for Victorians.”  Victorian Studies 52.2 (Winter 2009). 
• "Lady's Greek (with the accents): A metrical translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson." In Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006).
• “Metrical Translation: Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania.” In Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
• “Virginia Woolf and the Naked Cry of Cassandra.”  In Agamemnon in Performance, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Oliver Taplin.  Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
• “Sappho Recomposed: A Song Cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock.”  In The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Phyllis Weliver. Ashgate Press, 2005.
• “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters.”  In Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora.  Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.  Awarded Prize for Best Essay in 1999 by the Women’s Classical Caucus of the American Philological Association.  
• “Sappho’s Afterlife in Translation.”  In Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. Ellen Greene. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
• "Sappho Doubled: Michael Field." In The Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995).  
• "Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, and the Differance of Translation." In Victorian Poetry 33.1 (Spring 1995).
• "The Power of the Speech Act: Aeschylus' Furies and Their Binding Song." In Arethusa 24.2 (1991).  
• “Violence Bridling Speech: Browning’s Translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.” In Victorian Poetry 27.3-4 (1989).