As the department’s designated Byzantinist, I am charged with surveying the vast reaches of Greek culture beyond the perimeter of Homer to Hadrian, to which I nevertheless enjoy returning frequently.
My first, and still formative, university education was in Liberal Arts and History at the universities of Concordia and McGill, in Montréal. I went on to teach at a classical Gymnasium in the newly liberated Czech Republic before moving to Greece and two years of energetically unfocused study of the longue durée of Greek language and literature. Penance then came in the form of a disciplined M.A. in Classical Philology at the University of Western Ontario under rather generous tutelage.
A preternatural delight in palaeography along with an abiding curiosity about what else had been said in Greek led to a Ph.D. in Byzantine Literature at Harvard University’s Classics Department, supplemented by a year at the Byzantinisch-Neugriechisches Seminar of the Freie Universität Berlin and a dissertation completion idyll at the Dumbarton Oaks research center. After a stint as a lecturer at Harvard University I took up a post as a research-teaching fellow at Albert-Ludwigs Universität Freiburg, whence I come to Princeton.
Besides intros to Greek and Latin language, I have taught survey courses in both Classical and post-Classical Greek literature, from Homeric Epic to Achilles Tatius, as well as the Greek Fathers, Late Antique and Mediaeval Greek poetry, the Alexiad (the only surviving historical work by a pre-modern female author), the Greek historians of the later Roman empire and Latin prose.
Professor Bourbouhakis is an executive committee member for the Program in Medieval Studies. Read his full bio on the Department of Classics website.
