Michael Stephen Silk

Michael Stephen Silk FBA (born June 11, 1941 ) is a British Graecist and comparativeist .

Silk attended King Edward's School in Birmingham from 1953 to 1960 . From 1960 to 1964 he completed the Classical Tripos at St John's College , Cambridge , with a BA, followed by an MA in 1967 . In 1969 he was with a thesis on the early Greek lyric for Ph.D. PhD. Since 1967 he has been a Research Fellow at St John's College, and in 1970 he moved to King's College London as a lecturer . In 1985 he was appointed reader there and in 1991 professor. He has repeatedly held a visiting professorship in Greek and Comparative Literature at Boston University ,USA , true. From 2000 to 2003 he was a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, in 2009 he was made a Fellow of the British Academy and in 2010 a Fellow of King's College London (FKC).

In addition, he was Head of the Department of Classics at King's College London from 1993 to 1997 and held various functions in the administration of research and teaching.

Research priorities

In his work, Silk combines Greek studies (poetry, tragedy , comedy and ancient literary theory ) with a modern approach to literary theory , comparative and historical reception . Central themes are the poetic language ( metaphors ), the tragic (also Nietzsche's work The Birth of Tragedy ) and the comic ( Aristophanes ). Since Silk already practiced this connection at the end of the 1960s in his dissertation on the imagery of early Greek poetry published in the early 1970s, he can be considered one of the archegets of a trend that did not take off until the 1980s.

Silk has also overseen King's College Greek Play since 1981 , the annual production of an ancient Greek drama by students at King's College London, which was inaugurated in 1953 by Reginald Pepys Winnington-Ingram .

Fonts (selection)

• Interaction in poetic imagery with special reference to early Greek poetry. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1974, (online) .
• with Joseph P. Stern : Nietzsche on tragedy. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984, (online) .
• Homer, The Iliad . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, New York 1987; second edition, 2004, (online) . - Review by: Michael Broyles, in: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 07/07/2004 .
• (Ed.): Tragedy and the Tragic. Greek theater and beyond. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1996. - Review by: Michael R. Halleran, in: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 97.5.2 .
• Aristophanes and the definition of comedy. Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000. - Review by Keith Sidwell, in: Hermathena 172, 2002, pp. 85-90, (online) ; Ian C. Storey, in: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2001-09-35 .
• (Ed., With Anthony Hirst): Alexandria, real and imagined. Ashgate, Aldershot 2004. - Review of: Andrew Erskine, in: The Classical Review 55, 2005, pp. 594-595.
• (Ed., With Alexandra Georgakopoulou): Standard languages ​​and language standards. Greek, past and present. Ashgate, Farnham 2009, (online) .
• with Ingo Gildenhard and Rosemary Barrow: The Classical Tradition: Art, Literature, Thought. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2014, (online) . - Review by: Anne Mahoney, in: Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2014-07-50 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Michael Stephen Silk in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)
• Personal page at King's College London
• Curriculum Vitae (Download)
• Personal page on the British Academy website
• Classics and the Classical in the Eighteenth Century (Conference, King's College, The Strand, London, July 15–16, 2010: conference program)
• King's College London: Greek Play (including History of the Greek Play and Greek Play Archive )