Joshua H. Billings, newly named as the Sarai Ribicoff Assistant Professor of Classics and Humanities, focuses his research on tragedy, intellectual history, and the classical tradition. His appointment is effective immediately through June 30, 2016.
Joshua BillingsBillings studied at Harvard University where he received an A.B. in classics and German and an A.M. in comparative literature. He then attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar in German and classics. He began teaching at Yale in 2012, following a year as a research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. His courses include “Plato’s Symposium,” “Mimesis in Classical Athens,” Directed Studies Literature, and Directed Studies Philosophy.
His first book, “Genealogy of the Tragic: Greek Tragedy and German Philosophy,” traces how Greek tragedy and the concept of “the tragic” become important to conceptions of modernity and to the philosophical thought of German Idealism. He has co-edited volumes of essays, titled “Choruses, Ancient and Modern,” and “Tragedy and the Idea of Modernity.” He is currently co-editing a Norton Critical Edition of Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” and beginning a new book project on “the thinking of representation” in Athenian drama at the end of the fifth century.
