Dr Joshua Billings

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).

My next project will focus on the 'alphabetical plays' of Euripides, a group of plays that -- unlike the rest of extant Greek tragedies -- seems to have survived by chance rather than by selection (they are so named because they appear to come from a volume of Euripides's works in alphabetical order). This makes them particularly important for questions of genre in ancient Greece (what did 'tragedy' mean to a fifth-century Athenian?), and an interesting place to explore how our understanding of literature is historically conditioned ('tragedy' obviously means something different to us). Both this project and my current one explore how the history of reading is not only entropic, but also productive of meaning.

Recent publications

•  “Schiller and Opera”, Oxford German Studies 38 (2009), 15-29.
•  “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.