Virginia Tech professor Brian Britt presents this far-reaching study on biblical curses and their reception history. Britt’s introduction clearly sets out his goals for the book, especially the importance of distinguishing between the general power of curses in the ancient world and the general profanity of curses in early modern modern Europe and beyond.

A dictionary length entry on conversion in early Judaism for the Oxford Classical Dictionary.

State of the art article on reading in Antiquity (in German).

Uses social poetics to analyze talk in the Bible of looking at Yahweh’s face

The Rosen Vocabulary is an Old Babylonian bilingual text. Through an edition of this text, I argue that the ad-hoc mixed vocabularies known from the Old Babylonian period feature citations or allusions to literary compositions as well as subsequent analogous expressions, both in Sumerian and in Akkadian.

Sumerian lexical and literary compositions both emerged from the same social sphere, namely scribal education. The complexities of inter-compositional dependence in these two corpora have not been thoroughly explored, particularly as relevant to questions of text-building during the Old Babylonian period (c. 1800–1600 bce). Copying practices e…[Read more]

In Old Babylonian Sumerian literature, the temporal phrases u₄-ba and u₄-bi-a typically occur in complementary distribution. Previous analyses have focused on morphological disparity to differentiate the two. The present paper considers pragmatic functions within a larger discourse structure, analyzing them as discourse markers, specifically tem…[Read more]

Sumerian and Akkadian language contact in the early part of the second millennium BCE. The article discusses prevalent language ideologies based on native metalinguistic discourse in comparison with language use in practice with the phrase mu—pad₃ = nīš—itma ‘(s)he swore an oath’ as a case study.

Plutarch’s biography of Julius Caesar, compared with other accounts, deliberately plays down sexuality as a motive in Caesar’s life, in order to stress his single-minded political ambition.

An examination of how Plutarch explains Pompey’s loss in the war with Caesar partly by narrating his devotion to his wives, which distracts him at critical moments in his career.

This paper examines Plutarch’s accounts of ostracism and explores how he thought it worked in theory and in practice. Accounts of ostracism are found in six of the Lives, all of fifth-century Athenians, and in one of the Moralia. These accounts often relate the same event, and so they allow us to see how Plutarch presents the same material from…[Read more]

This chapter provides a series of case studies that explore different ways Archaic and Classical Greeks conceptualized human diversity (modern race and/or ethnicity) in relation to environment, in particular, the land. It explores three inter-related approaches the Greeks took towards understanding this relationship: myths of metals, autochthony,…[Read more]

The paper advances a new interpretation of Iamblichus’ De Vita Pythagorica and discusses its place in the history of neoplatonist biography from Porphyry’s Vita Plotini to Gregory of Nyssa’s De vita Moysis.

Bibliography for an advanced Greek seminar taught at Dartmouth in Winter 2015

Syllabus and bibliography for an advanced Greek seminar taught at Dartmouth in Winter 2016

Syllabus and bibliography for an advanced Greek seminar on Euripides’ Bacchae taught at Dartmouth in Winter 2017.

The paper proposes a new interpretation of Timon’s attack on Arcesilaus in fr. 806 SH.

from: A Companion to Sophocles, ed. K. Ormand (Wiley-Blackwell 2012) 440–461

This paper explores how gender can operate as a disguise for class in an examination of the self-sacrifice of the Maiden in Euripides’ Children of Herakles. In Part I, I discuss the role of human sacrifice in terms of its radical potential to transform society and the role of class struggle in Athens. In Part II, I argue that the representation o…[Read more]