Professor Joel Christensen will chat with registered members of Hour 25 on Thursday, February 27th from 2:00 – 2:45 p.m. EST (Boston, MA) to discuss the Odyssey and Breaking Bad. This event will be held in the Project Chatroom. [Look up the time of this chat in your time zone.]
We hope you will join this live session! Professor Christensen will also join our asynchronous conversation in the discussion forum during the days before his live visit. Help us begin the conversation by posting questions and comments for Professor Christensen in The Lyceum.
Dr. Christensen received his BA from Brandeis University in Classics and English and his PhD in Classics from New York University, earning an additional Certificate in Poetics and Theory. He is actively engaged in research that explores the development of literature and language in ancient Greece. His dissertation, “The Failure of Speech: Rhetoric and Politics in the Iliad”, an examination of the Iliad‘s internal conception of effective speech and the political importance of language, has developed into a series of articles on the use of language in Homer and the relationship between our Iliad and a putative poetic tradition.
In addition to explorations of language in the Iliad, Dr. Christensen also collaborates with E.T.E. Barker (Open University, U. K.) on rivalry and generic relationships in Archaic Greek poetry. Together they have published articles on the new Archilochus fragment, Oedipus in the Odyssey and are in the midst of a long-term project on the use of Theban myths in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Barker and Christensen have published a Beginner’s Guide to Homerand plan to publish their second book (Homer’s Thebes) within the next few years. In conjunction with his teaching and research interests, Dr. Christensen also writes on myth and its relationship with literary representations: he has published on the Gilgamesh poems, Greek myth and modern science fiction. In addition to being an active researcher, Dr. Christensen also has interests in New Media and conventional publications; he has recently started serving as the book review editor for The Classical Journal.
Selected Publications
Forthcoming — (with E. T. E. Barker) “Odysseus’ Nostos and the Odyssey’s Nostoi.” G. Scafoglio (ed.). Studies on the Greek Epic Cycle. 2015.
Forthcoming — “The Hero Herself: From Death-Giver to Storyteller in Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” in Ancient Women and Modern Media, William Duffy and Krishni Burns, eds. Cambridge Scholars Press, est. 2015.
Forthcoming – (with E. T. E. Barker) “Even Herakles Had to Die: Homeric ‘Heroism’, Mortality and the Epic Tradition”. Special Issue Trends in Classics: Homer and the Theban Tradition (Christos Tsagalis, ed.; 2014)
Forthcoming – “Diomedes’ Foot-wound and the Homeric Reception of Myth,” In Diachrony, Jose Gonzalez (ed.). De Gruyter series, MythosEikonPoesis. est. 2014.
Beginner’s Guide to Homer (with E. T. E. Barker), One World Publications (July, 2013)
“Aorist Morphology,” in Encyclopedia of Ancient Greek Language and Linguistics, ed. G. Giannakis, Brill. est. 2013.
“Innovation and Tradition Revisited: The Near-Synonymy of Homeric ΑΜΥΝΩ and ΑΛΕΞΩ as a Case Study in Homeric Composition.” The Classical Journal 108.3, 257-296.
“Ares: ἀΐδηλος: On the Text of Iliad 5.757 and 5.872.” Classical Philology 107.3, 230-238.
(with E.T.E. Barker) “On Not Remembering Tydeus: Agamemnon, Diomedes and the Contest for Thebes.”Materiali e Discussioni per l’Analisi dei Testi Classici 66, 9-44.
“First-Person Futures in Homer.” American Journal of Philology 131, 543-71.
For a complete list of publications, please see Dr. Christensen’s C.V.