Daniel Anderson

daniel.anderson@coventry.ac.uk 

My current project looks at premodern book cultures, especially those relating to Ancient Greece. Recent publications on this topic discuss writing metaphors in sympotic poetry of the Archaic period; authorial self-naming in Hipponax; and pseudepigraphic themes in Callimachus’ epigrams. This project develops an earlier interest in the structure of Hellenistic epigram anthologies. It also ties into work I have done on the dynamics of literary inheritance in antiquity, for example in articles on Semonides and Vitruvius.

The other major strand of my research is Old Comedy. My monograph argues that there was a period of intense and bold formal experimentation in Old Comedy of the generation before Aristophanes, centred around the now-obscure playwright Crates. Comic playwrights at Athens were not only trying new things out on stage, but explicitly signalled their own status as innovators on the model of contemporary developments in the natural sciences. They did so both individually as a way of distinguishing themselves within the Athenian theatrical competitions, and collectively within a context of fierce rivalry between comic theatrical traditions across the ancient Mediterranean. 

I hold a Bachelor of Arts from the Liberal Arts College of Concordia University in Montreal, as well as an MPhil and PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge, where I was a Scholar at St John’s College.

Together with Raffaella Cribiore (NYU), I am organiser of the 69th Entretiens sur l’antiquité classique at the Fondation Hardt in 2023. 

Main publications:

‘Early writing metaphors in performance’, forthcoming in R. Zelnick-Abramovitz, M. Finkelberg, and D. Shalev (eds.), Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World vol. 14: Textualization, Mnemosyne, Supplements (Brill), Leiden 2023.

‘Measuring up: the Greek analogies behind Vitruvius’ geometry of the body’, forthcoming in M. Hanses, E. Giusti, and G. Laterza (eds.), Homo bene figuratus: Beyond the Vitruvian Man, special thematic issue of Ramus, 2023.

‘Callimachus’ epigram theatre’, forthcoming in J. J. H. Klooster et al. (eds.), Hellenistica Groningana 27: Crisis and Resilience, Groningen 2023.

‘Semantic satiation for poetic effect’, Classical Quarterly 71.1 (2021) 34–51.

‘An unnoticed pun in Hipponax fr. 3a W. = 2 D.’, Philologus 165.1 (2021) 147–52.

‘Species of ambiguity in Semonides fr. 7’, Cambridge Classical Journal 64 (2018) 1–22.

‘Location and motif in Meleager’s coronis (A.P. 12.257)’, Materiali e discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 73 (2014) 9–23.