James I. Porter

James I. Porter (born December 23, 1954 ) is an American classical philologist .

Life

He received his BA in 1977 from Swarthmore College (major: history and classical Greek; minor: English), in 1979 an MA in comparative literature from the University of California, Berkeley and in 1986 a Ph.D. He then taught at the University of Michigan as Assistant Professor (1986–1992), Associate Professor (1992–2001) and Professor of Greek, Latin, and Comparative Literature (2001–2008). From 2007 to 2015 he was Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine . He now teaches at the University of California, Berkeley (2015-2018 as Chancellor's Professor of Rhetoric and Classics and since 2018 as Professor of Rhetoric and Classics and Irving Stone Chair in Literature).

His main research interests are philosophy (materialism, aesthetics, ethics), pre-Socratics up to the modern age, reception of antiquity, history of classical philology , critical theory, history and theory (from Homer to Foucault) and interrelationships between politics, culture and criticism. Ancient authors, to whom he turns from different perspectives, are Philodemos of Gadara , Lucretius and Epicurus, and Homer .

Fonts (selection)

• The Invention of Dionysus. An Essay on The Birth of Tragedy . Stanford 2000, ISBN 0-8047-3699-5 .
• Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future . Stanford 2000, ISBN 0-8047-3667-7 .
• The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece. Matter, Sensation, and Experience . Cambridge 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-84180-1 .
• The Sublime in Antiquity . Cambridge 2016, ISBN 978-1-107-03747-2 .

Web links

• James I. Porter - Professor - The Irving Stone Chair in Literature