Richard Janko Explained

Richard Janko
Birth Date:30 May 1955
Birth Place:Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire, England
Workplaces:Columbia University
University of California, Los Angeles
University College London
University of Michigan
Alma Mater:Trinity College, Cambridge
Thesis Title:Studies in the language of the Homeric Hymns and the dating of early Greek epic poetry
Thesis Year:1980
Doctoral Advisor:John Chadwick
Doctoral Students:Armand D'Angour

Richard Charles Murray Janko (born May 30, 1955) is an Anglo-American classical scholar and the Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan.[1]

Family and education

Janko was born on May 30, 1955, the descendant of an Austro-Hungarian revolutionary who left Vienna in 1848 to find refuge in London.

Janko was educated at Bedford Modern School[2] and won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge. With the encouragement of his parents, an electrician and a shopkeeper, he learned Greek from Andrew M. Wilson, who translated Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone.

As a student he took part in the British excavations at Agios Stephanos in Laconia, directed by Lord William Taylour, and wrote a doctoral dissertation under John Chadwick. He was elected a Research Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Scholarship

Janko's scholarship has focused primarily upon Bronze Age Greece, archaic Greek epic, especially the Iliad of Homer, ancient literary criticism, especially the Poetics of Aristotle, early Greek religion and philosophy (especially Empedocles, Orphism, and the Derveni papyrus), and the reconstruction of ancient books on papyrus-rolls. His study of epic diction, Homer, Hesiod and the Hymns, established by a statistical study of language the relative chronology of the corpus of early Greek epic poetry.

Janko published a controversial book Aristotle on Comedy, arguing that a summary of the lost second book of Aristotle's Poetics on comedy and humour survives in a tenth-century manuscript in Paris, the Tractatus coislinianus. This was shortly followed by an annotated translation of Aristotle's Poetics itself. He wrote the volume on Homer's Iliad 13-16 in the set of commentaries on Homer's Iliad edited by Geoffrey Kirk; in this he argues that Homer was a consummate artist of oral poetry.[3]

Janko was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship in 1986. In 1993 he delivered the Martin Classical Lectures on ancient literary criticism at Oberlin College.[4] His edition and translation of Philodemus' On Poems Book 1,[5] reconstructed from a series of Herculaneum papyri, was awarded the Goodwin Award of Merit by the American Philological Association in 2001.[6]

In 2008 he brought out the site-report of the excavations at the Bronze Age and Medieval settlement of Ayios Stephanos in Laconia; these excavations do much to clarify relations between Minoan Crete and the Mycenaean mainland. In 2011 he published Philodemus' On Poems Books 3 and 4, which contains fragments of Aristotle's lost dialog On Poets.

University positions

Janko is currently the Gerald F. Else Distinguished University Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan.[1] In this role, Janko instructs a range of courses, which include courses looking at Homer and the Trojan War[7] and the playwright, Euripides[8] as of 2024.

He has previously held positions at St. Andrews University, Columbia University, UCLA and University College London, where he was Professor of Greek. He has held Visiting Professorships at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.

He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, and to the American Philosophical Society in 2009.

Publications

Monographs, commentaries and critical editions

Articles (selected)

External links

Notes and References

  1. http://www.lsa.umich.edu/classics/people/departmentalfaculty University of Michigan, Department of Classical Studies faculty directory
  2. "School of the Black and Red, A History of Bedford Modern School" by Andrew Underwood (1981), reset and updated by Peter Boon, Paul Middleton and Richard Wildman, 2010
  3. Book: The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume 4: Books 13-16. Richard. Janko. 6 October 1991. Cambridge University Press. 4. 10.1017/CBO9780511620249 . 9780521237123 .
  4. Web site: Richard Janko | University of Michigan - Academia.edu. umich.academia.edu.
  5. Book: Philodemus: On Poems, Book I. 6 October 2003. Oxford University Press. 978-0-19-926285-4 . Google Books.
  6. Web site: List of Previous Goodwin Award Winners | Society for Classical Studies. classicalstudies.org.
  7. Web site: CLCIV 470 - Upper Level Topics in Antiquity . LSA Course Guide . University of Michigan . 15 January 2024.
  8. Web site: GREEK 402 - Greek Drama . LSA Course Guide . University of Michigan . 15 January 2024.

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