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. Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) theorizes the nexus between canonicity and sensory—especially haptic—materiality. On the threshold between critique and post-critique, my monograph, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (Ohio State University Press, “Classical Memories/Modern Identities,” 2020), 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. Through an engagement with the texts of ancient plays, art (Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly), architecture (Daniel Libeskind), and film, I locate Greek tragedy’s aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life-death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. 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 will be held at the Townsend center on November 6, 2024.
A monograph on Roman comedy and interobjectivity, entitledRoman Comedy against the Subject is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Another monograph entitled Edward Said and the Late Animal: the Queer Politics of Graeco-Roman Style is forthcoming from Oxford University Press.
I am the chief editor of the journal Classical Antiquity. I also serve on the editorial board of Representations.
With Dan Orrells and Jim Porter, I am organizing an international conference on Jean-Luc Nancy and Classics, sponsored by the Rhetoric department, which will take place at Berkeley on September 13-14 2024.
With Jim Porter, I am also putting together a book on William Kentridge, which is planned to come out in 2026.
Greek literature, Ancient Drama and its Reception, Critical Theory (psychoanalysis, queer theory, political theory, posthumanism, and new formalisms)
