Bryant Kirkland

I am currently Associate Professor of Classics, having joined the Classics Department at UCLA in 2017 after a year’s teaching at Kenyon College. My degrees are from Yale (PhD, 2016), UCL, and Davidson. I have been the recipient of a Fulbright Research Fellowship to Germany as well as a fellowship at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.

My research interests lie principally in Greek prose literature of the Roman Empire. My first book, Herodotus and Imperial Greek Literature (Oxford University Press, 2022), examined the diverse reception of Herodotus in specifically non-historiographic texts by Greek writers living amid Roman rule, tracing how Imperial Greeks recognized a set of Herodotean intellectual virtues that informed their own ideas of authorial persona, aesthetic and ethical criticism, and enactments of Greekness. The book was reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement and long-listed for the Anglo-Hellenic League’s Runciman Award, and it was honored with the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit from the Society for Classical Studies. Separately, I have written on historiographic features in the fragmentary novelist Antonius Diogenes; literary impersonation in the pseudo-Herodotean Life of Homer; the meaning of the critical tradition in Plutarch’s On the Malice of Herodotus; political resonances in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’s literary criticism; and concepts of friendship in Plutarch. Current projects include various essays on Dio Chrysostom, with volume chapters forthcoming on landscape, philosophical provocation, and fearmongering in Dio’s urban orations; an essay on the role of Anacharsis in Imperial Greek literature; and a larger project, in its early stages, on the concept of failure in Imperial Greek literature.

I regularly teach a wide range of classes at UCLA, including the General Education course “Discovering the Greeks”; various upper-division Greek language and literature courses; a course on Black Classicism; the graduate survey in Imperial Greek literature; and graduate seminars (most recently on Dio Chrysostom). I am always happy to meet with students interested in Imperial Greek literature and/or reception studies.