Mark Payne
Areas of Study: Department of Comparative Literature New Collegiate Division Department of Classics John U. Nef Committee On Social Thought Contact: Email
Within Greek and Roman literature, I have worked on lyric and didactic poetry, comedy, and Hellenistic poetry. More broadly, I am interested in animal and plant studies, primitivism ancient and modern, and, most recently, speculative fiction. I have published four books: Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; Hontology: Depressive Anthropology and the Shame of Life (Zero Books, 2018); and Flowers of time: On post-apocalyptic fiction (Princeton University Press, 2020). I have also recently written a foreword to poet Stephanie Burt’s After Callimachus for the Lockert Poetry in Translation series.