Classics

Egbert Bakker (PhD Leiden, 1988) held positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Université de Montréal (Canada) before coming to Yale. He also taught at the University of Virginia and Leiden University (The Netherlands).

Within the field of Greek language and literature he is interested among other things in the linguistic side of poetic problems and on ways of literary communication in Archaic and Classical Greek literature. He has written on oral poetry, poetic performance, the linguistic articulation of narrative, and the differences between speaking and writing. He is currently preparing Blackwell’s Companion to the Ancient Greek Language and is also working on a study of the importance of food in the Odyssey.

Main publications: Linguistics and Formulas in Homer (Benjamins, 1988); Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (Cornell UP, 1997); Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics (Center for Hellenic Studies/Harvard UP, 2005). He is (co-) editor of Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Performance, Tradition, and the Epic Text (Harvard UP, 1997); Grammar as Interpretation (Brill, 1997), and Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (Brill, 2002).