Mario Telò

In my scholarship, I seek to place antiquity in dialogue with modernity, defamiliarizing and destabilizing widely accepted critical positions by exploring the emancipatory potential of textual and visual form.  On the threshold between critique and post-critique, my monograph, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy, examines how contemporary theorizations of the archive (especially Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) and the death drive (in Freud as well as Bersani, Butler, Edelman, Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, and Žižek) can help us understand the aesthetic experience of tragedy. Watch the Townsend book chat that took place on December 9, 2020 and hear this podcast on the New Books Network. In March 2022, there was a Syndicate symposium on the book, with responses by Karen Bassi, Sean Gurd, Paul Kotman, Helen Morales, and Daniel Orrells. Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis (Tangent, Punctum Books 2023), which is centered around theoretically engaged readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria as well as the comic style of critical theory. You can hear a discussion of the book with Sean Gurd on TangentCast. Another book, Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading through Pandemic Times came out in 2023 with Bloomsbury (finalist for the 2024 Academic Prose Award). Here is the link to the Townsend book chat with Debarati Sanyal. A book entitled Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler was published in 2024 with Bloomsbury for the series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing. A conversation with Judith Butler on the book was held at the Townsend center on November 6, 2024. A monograph on Roman comedy and interobjectivity, entitled Roman Comedy against the Subject is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Another monograph entitled The Late Animal: Edward Said, Classicism, and the Limits of Humanism is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Another edited collection Jean-Luc Nancy's Antiquity is forthcoming.  I also serve on the editorial board of Representations. I am supervising dissertations on queer theory, psychoanalysis, and classical reception. I have recently taught a graduate course on Edward Said and one on COVID and ancient genealogies of the pandemic.