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Miriam Leonard

Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception

Term time office hours Term 2: Tuesday 2.00-3.00 & Thursday 11.00-12.00

Email: m.leonard@ucl.ac.uk

Research interests: Greek literature and philosophy; reception; history of modern European thought; critical theory

IRIS research profile

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After completing my PhD (Cambridge, 2002) I taught for six years in the Bristol Classics department. I joined the UCL department in September 2007.

My research explores the intellectual history of classics in modern European thought from the eighteenth century to the present. I examine how an engagement with the classical past has given rise to a particular understanding of modernity. I am currently working on two projects: an exploration of the role of tragedy in the modern history of thought and an investigation of the role antiquity in the Enlightenment and French Revolution. 

I have taught a wide range of options in Latin and Greek language and literature as well as courses in Reception, Philosophy and Critical Theory.

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Major Publications:

• Tragedy and Modernity (under contract, Harvard University Press)

• Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity; co-edited with Josh Billings (forthcoming, Oxford University Press)

• Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud (University of Chicago Press, 2012)

• Derrida and Antiquity; editor (Oxford University Press, 2010)

• Classical Reception and the Political; edited with Yopie Prins (special issue of thejournal Cultural Critique, 2010)

• How to Read Ancient Philosophy (Granta, 2008)

• Laughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought; co-edited with Vanda Zajko (Oxford University Press, 2006)

• Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought (Oxford University Press, 2005)

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Selected Articles and Chapters:

• ‘Prometheus and the Pentateuch: Feuerbach, Marx and the Genesis of Secular Anti-Semitism’, thesis eleven, 2010, 55-75‘
• ‘Greeks, Jews and the Enlightenment: Moses Mendelssohn’s Socrates’, Cultural Critique, 2010
• Oedipus in the Accusative: Derrida and Levinas’, Comparative Literature Studies, 2006, 224-251
• ‘History and Theory: Moses and Monotheism and the Historiography of the Repressed’ in Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (eds) A Companion to Classical Reception, (Blackwell, 2008), 207-218
• ‘The Uses of Reception: Derrida and the Historical Imperative’ in Charles Martindale/Richard Thomas (eds) Classics and The Uses of Reception (Blackwell 2006), 116-126
• ‘Tragic Will and the Subject of Politics’, Phoenix 2005, 133-42
• ‘Antigone, the political and the ethics of psychoanalysis’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 2003, 130-154
• ‘Politiques de l’amitié: Derrida’s Greeks and a National Politics of Classical Scholarship’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 2000, 45-78
• ‘Creating a Dawn: Writing through Antiquity in the Works of Hélène Cixous’ in Arethusa 2000, 121-148
• ‘Irigaray’s Cave: Feminist Theory and the Politics of French Classicism’, Ramus 1999, 152-168

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Ongoing and Future Projects:

• Editor with Tim Whitmarsh of OUP series Classics in Theory

• collaborative project on the theory of the tragic in modern thought

• long-term collaborative project on Classics and the Enlightenment