Dr. Mark de Kreij

de_Kreij@uni-heidelberg.de

Research interests

• archaic Greek epic 
• archaic Greek lyric 
• performance of archaic Greek song
• materiality of textual transmission, papyrology
• pragmatic linguistics of ancient Greek
• Greek particles

As a researcher within the Emmy Noether research group, I have the pleasure of focusing on particles in Homer and Pindar. Within the larger project we all have several tasks, ranging from the bibliographical research for our ‘guides to scholarship’ to organizing international meetings, and at the same time we each have our own field of research. My analyses of Homer’s epic and Pindar’s songs approach the texts not from a primarily semanto-syntactic angle, but rather takes into account dimensions such as performance, narrative structure, and textual coherence, to better explain the functions of particles.

My work here in Heidelberg is both an extension of and a departure from my earlier studies. During my undergraduate studies in Nijmegen I first encountered Pindar, and got interested Greek lyric. Still, I wrote my BA thesis on tragedy: the female heroine (in the ritual sense of the word) and how she was represented in tragedy.

After that, I started to work more on lyric, and archaic Greek poetry in general. Its fragmentary nature led to an interest in textual transmission, and as a result I took a course in papyrology. Besides my work here in Heidelberg I am still involved in papyrus work for the Oxyrhynchus project. Eventually, papyrology also became an integral part of the research for my thesis on the early textual transmission of Sappho’s songs. I had the pleasure of presenting the results of this project in presentations in Nijmegen and New York.

In my current research the focus has shifted to linguistics, under the tutelage of dr. Bonifazi, but my earlier work remains relevant. I am reminded every day that textual transmission, literary interpretation, and linguistics are interconnected. My paper on the particle μέν in Ibycus, presented in Durham (UK), is a direct result of this realization, and the interrelation of linguistics and literary studies is central to the workshop on particles and discourse organization in Homer and Pindar, which will take place in Heidelberg in May of 2012.

Curriculum vitae

Invited lectures and conference papers