James I. Porter

James I. Porter is Professor of Rhetoric and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley, where he holds the Irving Stone Chair in Literature. His teaching and research interests are in the areas of aesthetics, philosophy, literature, classical reception, and critical theory from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present. A recipient of fellowships from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung, and the Getty Research Institute, he previously held teaching positions at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and at the University of California, Irvine. He has also been the Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies and the Department of Classics & Ancient History at the University of Bristol (UK) and an Old Dominion Fellow in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. In May 2019 he will deliver the J. H. Gray Lectures at Cambridge University.

His publications include The Sublime in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2016), which was awarded the C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit from The Society for Classical Studies; (ed.) Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton University Press, 2013); The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2010); (ed.) Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton University Press, 2006); Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future (Stanford University Press, 2000); The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (Stanford University Press, 2000); (ed.) Constructions of the Classical Body (University of Michigan Press, 1999); and, co-authored, Postclassicisms (forthcoming, Chicago University Press). He is co-editor of Classical Presences, a book series in classical reception published by Oxford University Press.

He is currently completing a book entitled Homer: The Very Idea (to be published by Chicago University Press). His next book, Literary Aesthetics After Aristotle (Cambridge University Press), will be the final installment in a three-volume sequence, the aim of which is to provide a reappraisal of aesthetic reflection and experience in ancient Greece and Rome.