Elizabeth Irwin

Elizabeth Irwin has studied at Columbia (BA), Oxford (BA/MA) and Cambridge (PhD), and held Post-doctoral research fellowships and an affiliated lectureship at the University of Cambridge, teaching there, as well as at Oxford and Reading. Her first book, Solon and Early Greek Poetry: the Politics of Exhortation (Cambridge 2005), studies the intersection of early Greek hexameter poetic traditions with archaic poetic and political culture as found in the early Greek elegists, with a particular emphasis on Solon. She continues to work on archaic poetry and political culture, but has also turned increasingly to the literature of the fifth century, focusing on texts and issues dealing with Athenian empire. She has co-edited with Emily Greenwood a volume on Herodotus, Reading Herodotus: the Logoi of Book 5 (Cambridge 2007). She is currently writing on Herodotus, Thucydides and Cratinus, and has published several articles recently on Herodotus, among which are ‘”Lest the things done by men become exitêla”: writing up Aegina in a late fifth-century context’ and ‘Herodotus and Aeginetan identity’, in D. Fearn (ed), Aegina: Contexts for Choral Lyric Poetry (Oxford 2010), ‘Herodotus and Samos’, Classical World 102 (2009): 395-416, and ‘The politics of precedence: first historians on first thalassocrats’, in R. Osborne (ed), Debating the Athenian Cultural Revolution: Art, Literature, Philosophy and Politics 430-380 B.C. (Cambridge 2007) 188-223. Her interests extend also to historical contextualizations of Athenian drama, Pindar and Bacchylides, and the dramatic settings of the Platonic dialogues. She has recently been awarded fellowships by the Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, Humboldt Universität, Berlin (mid-2009-2010, 2011), Center for Hellenic Studies (2008-2009) and the Loeb Classical Library (2008). Elizabeth Irwin webpage.