Joshua Katz, Princeton University
Professor
Princeton, New Jersey
jtkatz@Princeton.EDU
Office:
(609) 258-3954
Expert In
Bio/Research
Widely published in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the ancient world, from India to Ireland via Greece, Rome, and the Near East, I am more or less equally interested in Greek and Latin. While there are recurrent themes in my work — for example, the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-Euro...
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Bio/Research
Widely published in the languages, literatures, and cultures of the ancient world, from India to Ireland via Greece, Rome, and the Near East, I am more or less equally interested in Greek and Latin. While there are recurrent themes in my work — for example, the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, poetics, and etymology, which I view as part of the history of ideas — I prefer in both my research and my teaching to prowl around topics rather than pursue one single line of inquiry: Hesiodic belly-prophecy and Horatian self-fashioning; Basque badgers and Roman testicles; the phonology of Tocharian monosyllables and the morphological peculiarities of Gothic pronouns; hieroglyphic Egyptian puns and modern English slang; etc. Recent articles have reinterpreted the opening of Vergil’s Georgics, refined a phonological rule in Hittite, proposed a novel explanation for the form of the pluperfect in Ancient Greek, and taken a fragmentary verse of Archilochus about blind eels as a launching point for insights into Anatolian, Celtic, and Greek mythology; a paper in press makes a stab at coming to terms with the place of the curious “anagram notebooks” in the life and thought of Ferdinand de Saussure.
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