Leon Grek

Leon Grek is a comparatist whose teaching and research focuses on the reception of classical antiquity in the Renaissance, and especially in English Renaissance literature and drama; he is particularly interested in the role of translation in the creation of ancient and early modern literary cultures and the relationships between literary production, language learning and other forms of knowledge. His current book project, Staging the Cosmopolis: Comedy and Translation in Republican Rome and Early Modern London explores how representations of urban life in dramatic comedies from third- and second-century BCE Rome, and from late sixteenth-century England, emerged out of, and responded to transnational networks of cultural exchange. Together with Wendy Laura Belcher and Jessica Wright, he has published The Jesuits in Ethiopia (1609-1641): Latin letters in translation (Harrassowitz, 2017); forthcoming articles explore the tragic temporality of classical intertexts in Ben Jonson's Sejanus and Catiline and the forgetting of Latin in the early modern English schoolroom. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and he was a 2016-17 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.