Matthew Ward

I work on Homeric epic, with particular interests in verse form, the various reading practices known as critical ‘theory’, and the intersections between the literary and textual criticism of Homer.

Prior to joining Christ’s as W.H.D Rouse Junior Research Fellow in 2021, I completed my PhD – entitled Vehicles of Meaning: Ships, Materiality, and the Boundaries of the Iliad – at Trinity College Dublin. In it, I explored the poetic functions and affordances of ships in the Iliad in order to show that ships are not simple background objects but rather meaningful material things that enact, encode, and structure the Iliadic world. My current focus is another project on Homeric epic, this time concerned with the politics within the repeated phrase patterns of epic language. Provisionally entitled The Politics of Quotation in Homeric Epic, this study hopes to offer a new take on the function and meaning of repeated phraseology in epic by reframing repetition as a process of appropriation and destabilisation inherent within the common ‘repetitions’ that constitute the Iliad and Odyssey.

Haunting my planned work is a rapidly developing interest in the relationship between regularity and irregularity in Homeric verse. In the late hours of the night I dream of individual and collaborative projects that might explore this relationship between continuity and change in Homer in terms of the textual criticism, hexameter form, and thematics of epic poetry.

I am always happy to hear from anyone interested in these topics, and in Homer more generally, and am willing to share copies of my publications on request.