BACKGROUND

B.A. Classical Studies, Dickinson College
M.A. Classical Studies, University of Michigan
Ph.D. Classical Studies University of Michigan

AREAS OF INTEREST

Greek tragedy, comedy and philosophy
Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato

Prof. Given is interested in the use of Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato and their contemporaries, to illuminate one another with regard to Greek intellectual history. He studies "not so much the influence of philosophy and drama on one another, as how the various genres articulate a common heritage of ethical thought and identity performance." Related to these ongoing studies, he has also studied practices of intertextuality and allusion between Greek tragedy and comedy and identity performance in the historian Herodotus. Perhaps most unusually, he also has a strong interest in twentieth-century American musical theater, a genre with surprisingly strong links to classical Greek drama.

He is currently working on a book-length project tentatively titled Identity Performance in Protagoras, Aristophanes and Euripides, as well as several articles, including works on the comic poet Cratinus, on the Birds of Aristophanes, and on the way in which Greeks before Plato thought of the concept of "art" or "skill".

TEACHING PHILOSOPHY

"My mantra in teaching is that the self-reflective student is the best student. It is vitally important to learning that a student at any level understand not only what he or she learns, but also how and why he or she learns. To this end, I direct students to examine their own methodology for studying, and to interrogate the course of their own education. In the realm of langauge learning in particular, I have been strongly influenced by my training at the University of Michigan, where methdological techniques have been developed to enable students to read non-spoken languages with great facility. Students, while studying the Greek or Latin language, learn a great deal about the structure of language itself and about their own linguistic habits.