Alexandre Johnston

Junior Research Fellow in Classics

Teaching

Research

My research focuses on the literature and religion of archaic and classical Greece. I am especially interested in the relationship between humans and gods in poetry and drama, and in the significance of literature as a medium of religious and philosophical thought. I obtained my PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2017 with a thesis on Sophocles’ tragedies and traditional Greek theology and ethics. I have since held a Leverhulme postdoctoral fellowship at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa (2017-19), where I worked on the relationship between divine and human agency in Greek thought. I am currently completing a monograph based on my doctoral research, and beginning work on a new project entitled ‘Poetic Theologies: Literature, Religion, and Ethics in Archaic and Classical Greece’.

Selected Publications

‘Knowledge, Suffering and the Performance of Wisdom in Solon’s Elegy to the Muses and the Babylonian Poem of the Righteous Sufferer’, Cambridge Classical Journal 65 (2019).

‘Poet of Hope: Elpis in Pindar’, in Hope in Ancient Literature, History, and Art, ed. G. Kazantzidis & D. Spatharas (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018), 35-52.

‘Rayon du soleil: un écho pindarique dans l’Antigone de Sophocle’, in Les intentions de la citation, ed. S. Trousselard & S. Coin-Longeray (= Les Cahiers d’ALLHiS 4, 2016), 21-35.

Review: Textual Events: Performance and the Lyric in Early Greek Poetry, ed. F. Budelmann & T. Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), Classical Review 69.2 (2019).

A volume co-edited with Felicity Loughlin, entitled ‘Antiquity and Enlightenment Culture: New Approaches and Perspectives’, is forthcoming with Brill (in press, expected 2019).