I began teaching at the University of Michigan in Classics and Comparative Literature (1986-2007), and then at UC Irvine, Classics and Comparative Literature (2007-2015), where I was Director of Critical Theory in 2014-2015, and arrived at Berkeley in 2015 as Chancellor’s Professor in Rhetoric. I have held visiting professorships at Princeton and Bristol University (UK) and have taught at UCLA and Stanford University. I received a number of fellowships here and abroad, most recently a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2019. I delivered the 2019 J. H. Gray Lectures at Cambridge University on the topic of “Thinking Through Homer,” and I gave the 2024 Princeton Seminar in Poetry and Poetics, with the title, “Cosmopoetics: Three Lectures.”
My teaching and research have followed a few different trajectories. One is a study of Nietzsche’s thought early and late, including two monographs and two edited volumes: Nietzsche and Literary Studies (Cambridge University Press, 2024); and (with Michael Forster), The Birth of Tragedy: A Critical Guide (Cambridge University Press, in progress).
Another research focus is the study of models of aesthetic sensation in ancient Greece and Rome, which I explored in The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (Cambridge University Press, 2010; pbk. 2016), and again in The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016; pbk. 2020), which received the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit from The Society for Classical Studies (2017). A related interest is philosophies of life from the Presocratics to Freud.
A further strand is Jewish critical philosophy and philology, including two edited volumes: Time, History and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton University Press, 2013; pbk. 2016) and Existence, Tragedy, and Faith: Selected Essays and Letters by Rachel Bespaloff (Princeton University Press, in progress).
My most recent book is Homer: The Very Idea (University of Chicago Press, 2021; pbk. 2023), which is a study in critical classical reception, one of my lifelong interests. I am founding co-editor of two book series in this vein and published by Oxford University Press: Classical Presences and Postclassical Interventions, and am a coauthor of Postclassicisms (Chicago University Press, 2020).
Ongoing and future projects include The Cynics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford); Being beyond the Self: Nature and Community from Heraclitus to the Roman Stoics; Philology in Exile: Spinoza to the Present. I will also be rounding out two trilogies with two further titles, Literary Aesthetics After Aristotle (Cambridge) and The Seductions of Metaphysics: Nietzsche’s Final Philosophy. All of these topics spill over into my teaching, and many of them have begun their life there, because I find that the classroom is one of the most productive places you can ever be.
Recent articles include “Nietzsche Ludens: Subversions of Literature and Philosophy in the Later Writings,” in Nietzsche and Literary Studies; “Foucault, Kant, and Antiquity,” in Representations (2024): “Late Foucault in the Early Foucault,” in The Foucauldian Mind, ed. D. Lorenzini (Routledge, 2025); and a two-part essay forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, “When Is Philology Made Jewish? The Example of Erich Auerbach.”
Recent and Future Seminars: “Introduction to Nietzsche” (Sp24); “Foucault and his Sources” (F24); “Tarrying with the Negative” (Sp25, co-taught with Mario Telò). See my profile on UC Berkeley Research for more information.
Education: BA Swathmore College
MA, PhD (Comparative Literature), UC Berkeley
