James I. Porter

  • University of California, Berkeley
  • Department of Rhetoric
  • Professor of Rhetoric

James Porter is Professor in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley.  Prior to that he taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he conceived and co-founded “Contexts for Classics,” an interdisciplinary consortium devoted to the reception of classical antiquity (www.umich.edu/~cfc/‎), as well as at the University of California, Irvine. His teaching and research interests include Philosophy, Literary and Cultural Criticism, Aesthetics, History of the Classical Disciplines, and the reception of Homer. He is the author of Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future and The Invention of Dionysus: An Essay on ‘The Birth of Tragedy’ (both Stanford U. Press, 2000), The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation, and Experience (CUP 2010), and The Sublime in Antiquity (CUP, 2015), in addition to the following edited books: Constructions of the Classical Body (Ann Arbor 1999), Before Subjectivity?: Lacan and the Classics (Helios 2004), Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome (Princeton, 2005),  and Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton 2014). He has been co-editor of Classical Presences (OUP), a book series in classical reception, since 2005. His next project is entitled “Homer: The Very Idea.”