A native of the Caribbean and Greece, Emmanuel Bourbouhakis studied History and Liberal Arts as an undergraduate at the universities of Concordia and McGill in Montreal before going on to teach high school English in the post-communist Czech Republic. An unstructured stint in Greece reading ancient, medieval, and modern Greek literature confirmed a devotion to Hellenism’s enduring legacy. Bourbouhakis earned an M.A. in Classics from the University of Western Ontario (’99) and a Ph.D. at Harvard University’s Classics department (‘07), partially carried out at the Freie Universität Berlin and completed during a stipendiary fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. He joined the Princeton Classics department in 2011.
Professor Bourbouhakis teaches classical, as well as post-classical, Greek at all levels, from intensive Attic Greek for beginners (CLG101-102/103) to Biblical and Hellenistic Greek (CLG240). Undergraduate courses in translation have been on subjects as varied as “Homer After Homer,” “Ancient Friendship and the Modern Self,” “The Lives of Female Saints,” “Sex and Salvation,” and “Constantinople,” as well as the Freshman Seminar, “From Codex to Code: Technologies of Learning.” Graduate seminars have been on Late Antique and Byzantine historiography as a literary tradition, and a medieval Greek philology seminar which surveys the methodological and broadly intellectual challenges facing the field through readings of texts joined to scholarship. He is currently at work on a monograph about medieval Greek epistolography (Letter-Writing and Epistolary Culture in Byzantium 10-12th c.) with the aim of profiling the lively, learned, and socially enigmatic practice of letter-writing in Byzantium during a period of self-conscious literary renewal.
