Egbert Bakker

Egbert Bakker's picture
Alvan Talcott Professor of Classics; Director of Graduate Studies
409 Phelps Hall
203-432-0987
Director of Graduate Studies in Classics, Spring 2020.

Egbert Bakker (PhD Leiden, 1988) has taught at Yale since 2004. Before he held positions at the University of Texas at Austin and at Université de Montréal (Canada). He also taught at the University of Virginia and Leiden University (The Netherlands).

Within the field of Greek language and literature he is interested among other things in the linguistic side of poetic problems and on ways of literary communication in Archaic and Classical Greek literature. He has written on oral poetry, poetic performance, the linguistic articulation of narrative, and the differences between speaking and writing. Currently his main project is a commentary of Book 9 of the Odyssey for the “Green and Yellow” series “Greek and Roman Classics,” Cambridge UP.

His recent books include Authorship and Greek Song: Authority, Authenticity, and Performance (Brill 2017); Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics (Center for Hellenic Studies/Harvard UP, 2005); A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (Wiley-Blackwell, Malden 2010); and The Meaning of Meat and the Structure of the Odyssey (Cambridge UP 2013).

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Greek language and literature; Greek linguistics.