Professor of Classical Studies
I received my BA from St. John’s College in Annapolis, the only school in the country, I tell my students, where Ancient Greek is required. That may not be strictly accurate, but I’m sure it’s the only school where Ptolemy’s Almagest is required reading. I then received my MA and PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, branding me forever as a “Great Books” sort of person and destining me for the Core. My first book, God and the Land: the Metaphysics of Farming in Hesiod and Vergil was published by Oxford University Press and my various articles range from a study of Hesiod’s treatment of farming, to an interest in the relation of poetry and philosophy in Plato, to studies of narrative time, to a look at T. E. Lawrence’s translation of the Odyssey, Shelley’s translation of the Symposium, and translation generally, considering the role of translation in the 20th c. in The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, vol. 5. In Aristophanes’ Tragic Muse: tragedy, comedy, and the polis in Classical Athens I looked at the relation of comedy and tragedy in Athens and my most recent work, “Or am I now I?”: Time and Identity in Ulysses and the Odyssey is on the relation of Joyce and Homer, which is, surprisingly, very little studied, beginning with an unfortunate comment of Ezra Pound’s that the Odyssey is merely “scaffolding” for Ulysses. Pound was a great poet, but he could be wrong about things.
What draws all these together, I suppose, is my interest in the way one author, culture, genre – or translator – appropriates another, transforming, distorting, and in a way repudiating the original, but also acknowledging a deep and even formative debt. So, I think, Virgil to Hesiod, Greek comedy to tragedy, and James Joyce to Homer. I have also become very interested in time and change generally and am now working on the relation of sight and sound, eye and ear, the simultaneous and that which exists only over time as we see the two in oral literature, in print and in the open and fluid new media developing around us constantly. I guess my belief is that having been forced to master Zoom, I can now master anything.