MA, DPhil
Professor Currie is the Mason Monro Fellow in Classics and Professor of Greek Literature. He teaches Greek and Latin languages and literature.
His chief research interests are in ancient Greek poetry (especially epic and lyric), ancient Greek religion, and in the interaction of these two. He is the author of Homer’s Allusive Art (2016), Pindar and the Cult of Heroes (2005) and co-editor of Epic Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil, and the Epic Tradition Presented to Jasper Griffin by Former Pupils (2006). He is currently working on a book called Hesiod and Myth.
“To study classical literature and classical culture is to become acquainted with the most beautiful and influential works of Western civilization. A comforting, and justifiable, claim for a classicist to make. But classics is – or should be – about asking questions that are not always comfortable. What does classical civilization owe to non-Western civilizations? How, after so many centuries of interpretation, can the products of ancient Greek and Roman culture be seen in their true light? (Does this poem really mean what the critics say it does? Does the translator capture the key nuances of the original language? Has the editor the original language text chosen the right reading from the available manuscripts?) More than anything else to study classics is perhaps to ask ever more fundamental questions about what we know and what can be known.”
Homer’s Allusive Art, Oxford University Press, 2016.
The Iliad, Gilgamesh, and Neoanalysis, in Homeric Contexts: Neoanalysis and the Interpretation of Oral Poetry, Montanari F, Rengakos A (eds.), (De Gruyter 2012), 535-572.
Pindar and Bacchylides, in Space in Ancient Greek Literature, (Brill 2012), 285-303.
Perspectives on neoanalysis from the archaic hymns to Demeter, in Relative Chronology in Early Greek Epic Poetry, Andersen A (ed.), (Cambridge University Press 2011).
Epinician choregia: funding a Pindaric chorus, in Archaic and Classical Choral Song, Athanassaki L, Bowie E (eds.), (2011), 269-310.
L’Ode 11 di Bacchilide: il mito delle Pretidi nella lirica corale, nella poesia epica, e nella mitografia, in Tra panellenismo e tradizioni locali. Generi poetici e storiografia, (Edizioni dell’Orso 2010), 211-253.
2006: with M. J. Clarke and †R. O. A. M. Lyne: Epic Interactions: Perspectives on Homer, Virgil and the Epic Tradition Presented to Jasper Griffin by Former Pupils (Oxford).
2005: Pindar and the Cult of Heroes (Oxford).
2004: ‘Reperformance Scenarios for Pindar’s Odes’, in: C. Mackie (ed.) Oral Performance and Its Context. Orality and Literacy in Ancient Greece vol. 5 (Brill: Leiden, Boston, Cologne) 49-69.
2002: ‘Euthymos of Locri: A Case Study in Heroization in the Classical Period’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 122: 24-44.