Lawrence Kim, Ph.D.

I have been teaching at Trinity in the Classical Studies Department since 2010, aside from two years (2013-14, 2015-16) spent on leave in Germany, at the University of Heidelberg, on an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. Before I came to Trinity, I worked in the Classics departments at the University of Washington, Seattle, and the University of Texas at Austin. My Classics teaching includes language courses—advanced Latin and all levels of Ancient Greek—as well as a rotating trio of ancient literature and history courses—Classical Mythology, The Ancient Novel, and The World of Late Antiquity. In addition, I regularly teach in the First-Year Experience, Great Books of the Ancient World (known as HUMA); I am currently also the director and co-ordinator of HUMA, which comprises the FYE and HUMA 2301.

My research focuses on the so-called "Second Sophistic," or the renaissance of Greek literature and culture under the High Roman Empire (roughly 50-250 CE), but I am also interested in ancient narrative prose, literary criticism, and historiography of all periods. My book, Homer between History and Fiction in Imperial Greek Literature (Cambridge, 2010) looks at some of the ways in which the extent of Homer's knowledge of the Trojan War was debated, defended, and mocked by four Greek writers of the Empire: the geographer Strabo, the orator Dio of Prusa, the satirist Lucian, and the writer Philostratus. The book was awarded the 2011 Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit as an outstanding contribution to classical scholarship from the Society for Classical Studies (formerly the American Philological Association).

My recent publications (listed below, for more visit my Academia.edu page) reflect my ongoing research on various aspects of Greek culture under the Roman Empire: literary criticism, prose style, the novel, the reception of Homer, and more broadly, Imperial Greek authors' perception and understanding of their past. My two current long-term projects, which combine many of these interests, focus on 'anti-classicizing' movements in the Second Sophistic and are tentatively titled The Idea of the Archaic in Imperial Greek Culture and The Politics of Style in Imperial Greece.