Tim Whitmarsh

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Timothy John Guy Whitmarsh, FBA (born 23 January 1970) is a British classicist and Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge. He is best known for his work on the Greek literary culture of the Roman Empire, especially the Second Sophistic and the ancient Greek novel.

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Early life and education

Whitmarsh was born on 23 January 1970 in Chelmsford, Essex, England. He was educated at Moor Park School, a Catholic prep school near Ludlow, and at Malvern College, then an all-boys private school. [1] He took his undergraduate degree and doctorate at the University of Cambridge.

Academic career

From 2001 to 2007 he taught in the department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter where he remains an honorary fellow. [2] He then served as E. P. Warren Praelector, Fellow and Tutor in Greek at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and Professor of Ancient Literatures at the University of Oxford. [3]

In October 2014, he succeeded Paul Cartledge as the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. [4] In 2022, he delivered the Gifford Lectures on Religion and Ancient Mediterranean Thought at the University of Aberdeen. [5] In 2023, he became Regius Professor of Greek in Cambridge, succeeding Richard Hunter. [6]

Classics Confidential

Whitmarsh appears in the Classics Confidential series in conversation with various classical scholars:

Publications

His publications include Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation, [7] Ancient Greek Literature, [8] The Second Sophistic, [9] and Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance, [10] Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Second Sophistic</span> Term for 1st to 3rd century Greek sophist writers

The Second Sophistic is a literary-historical term referring to the Greek writers who flourished from the reign of Nero until c. 230 AD and who were catalogued and celebrated by Philostratus in his Lives of the Sophists. However, some recent research has indicated that this Second Sophistic, which was previously thought to have very suddenly and abruptly appeared in the late 1st century, actually had its roots in the early 1st century. It was followed in the 5th century by the philosophy of Byzantine rhetoric, sometimes referred to as the Third Sophistic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ancient Greek literature</span> Literature written in Ancient Greek language

Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, the Theogony and Works and Days, constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.

Glen Warren Bowersock is a historian of ancient Greece, Rome and the Near East, and former Chairman of Harvard’s classics department.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Paul Cartledge</span> British ancient Greece historian (born 1947)

Paul Anthony Cartledge is a British ancient historian and academic. From 2008 to 2014 he was the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at the University of Cambridge. He had previously held a personal chair in Greek History at Cambridge.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Simon Goldhill</span> British classicist (born 1957)

Simon David Goldhill, FBA is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Mary Jacobus in October 2011. He is best known for his work on Greek tragedy.

Patricia Elizabeth Easterling, FBA is an English classical scholar, recognised as a particular expert on the work of Sophocles. She was Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge from 1994 to 2001. She was the 36th person and the first — and, so far, only — woman to hold the post.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hugh Lloyd-Jones</span> British classical philologist (1922–2009)

Sir Peter Hugh Jefferd Lloyd-Jones was a British classical scholar and Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford. Educated at Westminster School and at Christ Church, Oxford, he served as a linguist and intelligence officer during the Second World War, including a stint at the code-breaking centre at Bletchley Park. After a brief fellowship at Jesus College, Cambridge, he moved to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he remained for the rest of his academic career. In 1961, he was made Regius Professor of Greek.

Richard Lawrence Hunter FBA is an Australian classical scholar. From 2001 to 2021, he was the 37th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge.

The A. G. Leventis Professorship of Greek Culture is the first professorship in Classics to have been endowed at Cambridge University since World War II, and Trinity College Dublin since 2017. Its purpose is to focus on the study of more than 1,000 years of Greek cultural achievements and to highlight the lasting influence they continue to have on society today.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford</span> Academic department in the UK

The Faculty of Classics, previously the Faculty of Literae Humaniores, is a subdivision of the University of Oxford concerned with the teaching and research of classics. The teaching of classics at Oxford was present since its conception and was at the centre of nearly all its undergraduates' education well into the twentieth century.

Five ancient Greek novels or ancient Greek romances survive complete from antiquity: Chariton's Callirhoe, Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Clitophon, Longus' Daphnis and Chloe, Xenophon of Ephesus' Ephesian Tale, and Heliodorus of Emesa's Aethiopica. There are also numerous fragments preserved on papyrus or in quotations, and summaries in Bibliotheca by Photius, a 9th-century Ecumenical Patriarch. The titles of over twenty such ancient Greek romance novels are known, but most of them have only survived in an incomplete, fragmentary form. The unattributed Metiochus and Parthenope may be preserved by what appears to be a faithful Persian translation by the poet Unsuri. The Greek novel as a genre began in the first century CE, and flourished in the first four centuries; it is thus a product of the Roman Empire. The exact relationship between the Greek novel and the Latin novels of Petronius and Apuleius is debated, but both Roman writers are thought by most scholars to have been aware of and to some extent influenced by the Greek novels.

Christopher Kelly is an Australian classicist and historian, who specializes in the later Roman Empire and the classical tradition. He has been Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge since 2018.

Gregory Owen Hutchinson, known as G. O. Hutchinson, is a British classicist and academic, specialising in Latin literature, Ancient Greek literature, and Latin and Ancient Greek languages. Since October 2015, he has been the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, and a Student of Christ Church, Oxford.

Publius Anteius Antiochus, or Antiochus of Aegae, was a sophist—or, as he claimed to be, a Cynic philosopher—of ancient Rome, from the Cilician port city of Aegeae. He lived around the 2nd century AD, during the reigns of the Roman emperors Septimius Severus and Caracalla, and is known from a number of inscriptions that indicate him to have been a student of Philostratus, as well as a Syrian named Dardanus and a certain Milesian named Dionysius.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge</span> Constituent department of the University of Cambridge

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Ahuvia Kahane is a British academic working in Ireland, specializing in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, its traditions and the relations between the ancient world and modern culture and thought. Kahane is the 17th Regius Professor of Greek at Dublin, the A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture (2017) and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He is also Senior Associate at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford.

References

  1. "Whitmarsh, Prof. Timothy John Guy". Who's Who 2020 . Oxford University Press. 1 December 2019. doi:10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U279563 . Retrieved 17 February 2020.
  2. University of Exeter Department of Classics accessed 3 October 2014
  3. "Tim Whitmarsh". President and Fellows. Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Retrieved 8 May 2014.
  4. "AG Leventis Professor of Greek Culture". University of Cambridge. 21 January 2014. Retrieved 8 March 2014.
  5. "The Gifford Lectures". abdn.ac.uk. University of Aberdeen.
  6. "Elections and appointments" (PDF). Cambridge University Reporter (6683). 18 January 2023. Retrieved 20 January 2023.
  7. Tim Whitmarsh, Greek Literature and the Roman Empire: The Politics of Imitation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN   978-0-19-927137-5.
  8. Tim Whitmarsh, Ancient Greek Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004. ISBN   978-0-7456-2792-2.
  9. Tim Whitmarsh, The Second Sophistic. Greece and Rome New Surveys in the Classics 35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN   978-0-19-856881-0.
  10. Tim Whitmarsh, Narrative and Identity in the Ancient Greek Novel: Returning Romance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. ISBN   978-0-521-82391-3.
  11. Beyond the Second Sophistic: Adventures in Greek Postclassicism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. ISBN   978-0-520-27681-9.
Academic offices
Preceded by A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Cambridge University
2014–2023
Succeeded by
TBC
Preceded by Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University
2023–
Succeeded by
incumbent