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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. 

Current research 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. At present a third volume, dealing with Space in Ancient Greek Literature, is being prepared.

Another of her current projects is to write a commentary on Iliad 22, for the Cambridge 'Green-Yellow' series.