Associate Professor of Classical Studies
About
On leave for Fall 2022
My current research focuses on archaic and early classical Greek poetry and cultural history. My first book, The Seer and the City: Religion, Politics, and Colonial Ideology in Ancient Greece (UC Press 2018), explores the ideology of colonial discourse and the tussle between different forms of oracular power in ancient Greece. The book leverages the interpretive strengths of Cultural Poetics’ theoretical framework and the analytical practices of literary formalism. Bringing together these two approaches, I reveal how colonial discourse’s privileging of the city’s founder and his dependence on Delphi, the colonial oracle par excellence, entails a corresponding suppression of the independent Greek seer.
In 2019, I co-edited a book with Leslie Kurke and Naomi Weiss, Genre in Archaic and Classical Greek Poetry: Theories and Models (Brill). This volume foregrounds innovative approaches to the question of genre, what it means, and how to think about it for ancient Greek poetry and performance. Embracing multiple definitions of genre and lyric, the volume pushes beyond current dominant trends within the field of Classics to engage with a variety of other disciplines, theories, and models.
I am at work now on a monograph about the politics and polemics of fifth-century lyric poetry and its generic dialogue with Attic tragedy.
Fields of study:
- Greek literature, especially archaic and classical poetry
- Greek cultural history
- Greek religion
- genre
