Texas Tech University

Sweating for the Gods:

The Competitive Spirit in Ancient Greece

Dr. David H. J. Larmour

Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Classics, Texas Tech University

Dr. David H. J. Larmour (B.A., Queen's University Belfast; M.A. and Ph.D. in Classical Philology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) has particular interests in ancient sports, Plutarch, Greek and Roman satire, narrative theory; and comparative literature.

He has published on Corinna, Euripides, Plutarch, Lucian, Ovid, and Juvenal, as well as Nabokov and Dostoyevsky. His book, Stage and Stadium: Drama and Athletics in Ancient Greece was published by Weidmann Press in 1999. He is also the co-author with Aristoula Georgiadou of Lucian's Science Fiction Novel True Histories (1998), an interpretation and commentary of that work. He has edited volumes on Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity (1997), Russian Literature and the Classics (1996), and Discourse and Ideology in Nabokov's Prose (2002). In 2007, Oxford University Press published The Sites of Rome: Time, Space, Memory, a volume co-edited by Dr. Larmour and Diana Spencer. He is currently completing a book on Juvenalian satire and the body, in particular the connections between satire and the Roman arena, and the “modern Juvenalians” of the 20th century.

In autumn 2006, he was Honorary Visiting Fellow at University College, London and gave talks on Juvenal at the University of Glasgow, on Nabokov and Orpheus at the University of Bristol, and two public lectures on Nabokov and Roman satire at the University of Budapest. In 2007, he gave talks in Paris and Clermont-Ferrand in France and at the University of Geneva in Switzerland.

Dr. Larmour co-founded with Paul Allen Miller the journal Intertexts, which publishes articles of comparative and theoretical reflection. He was editor for 10 years. Since December 2007, he has been the editor of The American Journal of Philology.

Dr. Larmour's lecture was held in the College of Media and Communication at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, TX, November 29, 2012.

This event was cosponsored by the Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures.