Home

Curriculum vitae

Irene de Jong was educated at the Unversity of Amsterdam (1975-1982). After one year as a secondary schoolteacher and one year as Stipendiatin at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, Hamburg, where she worked for the Lexikon des fruehgriechischen Epos, she started work on her dissertation (Narrators and Focalizers. The Presentation of the Story in the Iliad, Amsterdam 1987). In 1988 she was appointed as Academy Fellow, in 1998 as Academy Professor. She holds the chair of Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam since 2001. Since 2007 she is a member of the Academia Europaea.

   Applying concepts from narratology to ancient texts, notably Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, and Euripides, Irene de Jong has opened new areas of research, refined interpretations, and modernized age old philological tools such as commentaries and literary histories. 

 

Currentresearch projects

She is presently editing a multi-volume and multi-author literary history of ancient Greek narrative texts. Its organization is formal rather than biographical. It traces the history of central narrative devices, such as the narrator and his narratees, focalization, characterization, description, speech, and plot. It offers not only analyses of the handling of such a device by individual authors, but also a larger historical perspective on the manner in which it changes over time and is put to different uses in different genres. In 2004 the first volume, Narrators, Narratees, and narratives in Ancient Greek Literature, appeared with Brill, Leiden; in 2007 the second volume, Time in Ancient Greek Literature; in 2012 the third volume,  Space in Ancient Greek Literature. 

She is currently leading two NWO sponsored projects: Space in ancient Greek narrative and (with professor Caroline Kroon from the VU) Ancient War narrative, a combined linguistic-narratological approach.

Recent publications 

Sophocles Trachiniae 1-48, Euripidean Prologues, and their Audiences’, in R. Allan, M. Bijs (eds.) The Language of Literature. Linguistic Approaches to Classical texts ( Leiden , Brill  2007), 7-28

 ‘Metalepsis in Ancient Greek Literature’ , in J. Grethlein , A. Rengakos (eds.) Narratology and Interpretation. The Content of Narrative Form in Ancient Literature. Trends in Classics 4  ( Berlin , W. de Gruyter 2009) , 87-115. 

‘Narratology and the Classics: the Proof of the Pudding...’, in H. Liss,  M. Oeming (eds.), Literary Construction of Identity in the Ancient World (Winona Lake, Eisenbrauns 2010), 81-100.  

‘Narrative’, in M. Finkelberg (ed.) The Homer Encyclopdia II (Wiley-Blackwell, Malden-Oxford 2011), 554-6. 

Odysseia. Ena Afēgēmatologiko hypomnēma (Thessaloniki, University Studio Press, 2011). 

‘The Shield of Achilles: from metalepsis to mise en abyme’,   Ramus 40, 2011, 1-14

 

Homer Iliad Book XXII (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2012).

 

 ‘Euripides and his Prologues: a Reappraisal’, Pharos 17 (2012), 21-34.

 

Homer Iliad Book XXII (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2012).