Research Expertise and Interest

classics, Greek literature and culture, archaic Greek poetry, Herodotus, Aesop, Ancient Greek popular culture

Research Description

Leslie Kurke has spent much of her research life working on ancient Greek literature and cultural history--especially archaic Greek poetry, Herodotus, the ideology of form, and various interactions of word and world, literature and its “others” (the economics of literature, poetry and/as ritualization, text and popular culture, the dialectic of performed song and place/monuments). She is currently completing a book, co-authored with Richard Neer, entitled Pindar’s Sites: Song and Space in Classical Greece.

She has taught at UC Berkeley in Classics and Comparative Literature since 1990, and has also taught as a visitor at Princeton University, Wellesley College, and the University of Chicago. Her teaching in two departments ranges across much of archaic and classical Greek literature, gender and sexuality in Greek and Victorian cultures, literary theory, Elvis, detective fiction, and psychoanalysis.