Email: eaustin1@uchicago.edu

Emily Austin writes on Homer, especially emotions, as well as literary depictions of solitude in ancient Greece. Her first book, Grief and the Hero: the Futility of Longing in the Iliad, explores the nexus of grief, longing and anger in the Iliad. This work begins with a verbal find—Achilles’ grief for Patroklos is uniquely described with the Greek word “longing” (ποθή)—and through this discovery, the book traces the relationship between grief and action, giving a narrative account for why Achilles’ anger is insatiable. Her current research projects include a second book, Solitude and its Powers in Ancient Greece (in progress), which identifies surprising moments when ancient Greek poetry conceives of solitude as a good thing. In addition, Austin has written articles on Homeric similes and their relation to the narrative; meaningful variation in Homeric formulae; and the power of inactivity in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and the Iliad.

Email: helmadik@uchicago.edu

Professor Dik’s primary interest is in the synchronic linguistics of Classical Greek, especially the interplay of syntax, semantics and pragmatics as well as the specific manifestations of language use (“stylistics”) in particular authors, such as Herodotus, Demosthenes, and Sophocles. Her long-term goal is to produce a reference grammar of Classical Greek that takes into account the many developments in the field in the last century. This has led to collaborative efforts with the Perseus Project (Tufts & Leipzig) and many other Digital Classics projects in various countries, as well as to the co-organization of an annual colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, a regional conference now hosted on a rotating basis by Chicago, IIT, Northwestern, Loyola and DePaul. Currently, her digital activities have led to research questions such as on automated parsing algorithms for Greek and Latin, or on gendered language in drama through text mining. This and other topics are the subject of a book in progress. She has supervised  dissertations on the style of Demosthenes, on gemstones with a network analysis approach, on the application of conditional random field parsers to Greek, and on text mining approaches to Thucydides. Her undergraduate students have gone on to work as IT consultants and programmers in industry and in academia, as well as to graduate study in Classics.

Check out Professor Dik’s new blog: Logeion and Philo4Classics and these nifty Greek handouts.

Email: jhall@uchicago.edu

Jonathan Hall’s earlier research was focused on the cultural and social history of ancient Greece, with a particular emphasis on the construction, meaning, and functions of ethnic identity among Greek communities. His first book, Ethnic Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 1997) received the 1999 Charles J. Goodwin Award for Merit from the American Philological Association, while Hellenicity: Between Ethnicity and Culture (Chicago, 2002) was the recipient of the 2004 Gordon J. Laing Award from the University of Chicago Press. He has also tackled questions of historical method which are explored in History of the Archaic Greek World, ca. 1200–479 BCE 2nd edn. (Chichester, 2014), which has been translated into Polish and Greek, and in Artifact and Artifice: Classical Archaeology and the Ancient Historian (Chicago, 2014). His most recent book is Reclaiming the Past: Argos and its Archaeological Heritage in the Modern Era (Ithaca, 2021). He is also the author of a series of articles and chapters concerning the early polis, Greek colonization, and cultural identities. In 2009 he was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Email: rtneer@uchicago.edu 

Richard Neer is Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor of Art History, Cinema & Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago.  From 2010 to 2018 he was the Executive Editor of Critical Inquiry, where he continues to serve as co-Editor. He is currently Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, and is scheduled to return to the department of Art History in 2025-26.

Neer works at the intersection of aesthetics, archaeology and the history of art in multiple fields: Classical Greek sculpture, early modern French painting, theories of style, and mid-20th century cinema.  His Ph.D. is from the University of California at Berkeley (1998), his A.B. from Harvard College (1991). He has received fellowships and awards from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the J. Paul Getty Trust and the American Academy in Rome. His most recent books are the second edition of Art and Archaeology of the Greek World: A New History, 2500–100 BCE (Thames & Hudson, 2018); Davidson and His Interlocutors, a special issue of Critical Inquiry co-edited with Daniele Lorenzini (Winter 2019); an edited volume, Conditions of Visibility (Oxford University Press,  2019); and Pindar, Song, and Space: Toward a Lyric Archaeology, co-authored with Leslie Kurke (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), which won the 2020 PROSE Award in Classics from the Association of American Publishers. He is currently writing a book on Nicolas Poussin, the Brothers Le Nain and their contemporaries, under contract with the University of Chicago Press.