Bruce King
Part-time Faculty
bmk7@nyu.edu
(212) 992-6327
1 Wash Pl, Room 714
B.A., University of Chicago, 1985
M.A., University of Chicago, 1987
Ph.D., Classics, University of Chicago, 1997
Bruce M. King's research and teaching interests focus on the ancient world, particularly Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit epic, Greek philosophy and religion, and lyric and dramatic poetry; he is particularly interested in anthropological, comparative, psychoanalytic, and gender-based approaches to antiquity. King previously taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and Vassar College, where he was the Blegen Research Fellow (2005-2006); he has also been a Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC (2005) and of the Reid Hall Institute for Scholars in Paris (2007). He has recently published articles on self-destruction and world-destruction in the Iliad, on the queer reception of Achilles and Patroclus, on ideas of character in the Greek pre-Socratic philosophers, and on teaching the Odyssey (forthcoming). Additionally, he is completing a book on the Iliad, entitled Achilles Unheroic, and has undertaken a book-length study of the philosophical, religious, and political revolutions of Magna Graecia in the archaic and classical periods.
Edited Volumes
2018
Bruce M. King, is co-editor, with Lillian Doherty, ofThinking the Greeks: A Volume in Honor of James M. Redfield, which was released by Routledge.
Teaching and Research Interests
Greek and Roman antiquity; ancient and comparative epic; Greek philosophy and religion; ancient lyric and drama; anthropological and comparative approaches to classics; psychoanalysis; gender theory and queer theory
Recent News
CONFERENCES AND TALKS
In August of 2017, Professor Bruce King gave a paper entitled "Remember Patroklos" at the biennial International Symposium on The Odyssey, which was held at the Center for Odyssean Studies in Ithaki, Greece. In November of 2017, he gave an invited lecture to the Department of History and Classics at McGill University on the use of historical figures in Platonic dialogue.
Along with Lillian E. Doherty (University of Maryland, College Park) and Christopher Faraone (The University of Chicago), Professor King co-organized the May 2015 conference at the University of Chicago, in Chicago, Illinois, Thinking the Greeks: A Conference in Honor of James M. Redfield and presented his paper "The Desert Island and the Palaestra: Scene and Genre in Sophocles' Philoctetes and Plato's Lysis."
PUBLICATIONS
Along with Lillian Doherty (University of Maryland), King co-edited the forthcoming Thinking the Greeks: A Volume in Honor of James M. Redfield (Routledge, 2018), which contains a set of papers at the intersections of Classics and social and literary theory and includes an introduction by Doherty and King.The volume also includes his paper "Contrafactual Education in Plato's Lysis and Sophokles' Philoktetes."
His article on "Margites" is forthcoming in 2018 in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Homer.
King published “The Future of a Dualism: Freud’s Empedocles,” in Classical Myth and Psychoanalysis: Ancient and Modern Stories of the Self, ed. V. Zajko and E. O’Gorman (Oxford, 2013).
Courses
2022 Spring
Mahabharata and Ramayana: Myth and Conflict
2021 Spring
Mahabharata and Ramayana: Myth and Conflict
2021 Fall
Music and Civic Culture: Ancient and Modern
2020 Spring
Mahabharata and Ramayana: Myth and Conflict
2020 Fall
Kinship and Community: Ancient Texts and Modern Theories
2019 Spring
Mahabharata and Ramayana: Myth and Conflict
2019 Fall
