Faculty of Classics - University of Cambridge

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Dr Joshua Billings

Research Fellow at St. John's College

Contact: 
St John's College, Cambridge CB2 1TP

Email:  jhb39@cam.ac.uk

Research:

My research focuses on tragedy and intellectual history in the classical tradition, centering on ancient Greece and modern Germany. My dissertation and current book project, provisionally entitled A Genealogy of the Tragic, looks at the theory of tragedy in Germany around 1800. It concentrates on Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, and Hölderlin, important thinkers and artists who were fascinated by Greek tragedy and gave it an extraordinary importance in their writings. I try to show where this interest came from and suggest some of what its consequences have been. I am also co-editing two volumes of essays: one on the ancient chorus and its reception (with Fiona Macintosh and Felix Budelmann), and one on philosophical appropriations of tragedy (with Miriam Leonard).

Publications:

“Misreading the chorus: Nietzsche’s Geburt der Tragödie as methodological critique”, Nietzsche-Studien 38 (2009), 246-68.

“Hyperion’s symposium: an erotics of reception”, Classical Receptions Journal 2 (2010), 4-24.

“Epic and Tragic Music: the union of the arts in the eighteenth century”, Journal of the History of Ideas 72.1 (2011), 99-117

“Greek tragedy and vaterländische Dichtkunst”, in “Das Fremde im Eigensten.” Die Funktion von Übersetzungen im Prozess der deutschen Nationenbildung, ed. B. Kortländer and S. Singh. (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2011), 1-14.

“Choral dialectics: Hölderlin and Hegel”, forthcoming in Choral Mediations in Greek Drama, ed. R. Gagné and M. Hopman (Cambridge: CUP).

cf.http://www.yale.edu/classics/faculty_billings.html