Dr Leon Wash
IRC Postdoctoral Fellow
I received my doctorate in Classics from the University of Chicago in 2021, with a dissertation on metaphor and the concept of nature in the poets Pindar and Empedocles. Then I spent two and a half years teaching at Colgate University in rural New York, where people are about as proud of their dairy products as the Irish; I also continued teaching intensive ancient Greek each summer in Chicago, where they are almost as proud of their music. I’m thrilled to be here in Dublin and at TCD for my IRC project, ‘“Rhyme” in Ancient Greek Hexametric and Elegiac Poetry’, sponsored by Professor Ahuvia Kahane.
The aim of my project is a systematic study of rhyme phenomena in those metres, building on a growing recognition of their presence and studies of related patterns of repetition by Prof Kahane and others. A large-scale study was made much more practicable by collaboration with Dr Keith Begley (Durham; PhD, TCD), who had already developed a computer program to test certain claims about the language of Heraclitus. We have been developing a program to cull different rhyme patterns and statistics about them; and we intend to make the program publicly available in the coming year.
My main research before now has been more directly related to my dissertation, and focused on the histories of certain concepts and metaphors in poetry and natural philosophy, especially on the topics of nature, plants, and the environment. In addition to continuing my own research on those topics, I co-organize a seminar series, ‘Phusis kai phuta: on nature and plants in ancient Greece’, with Alessandro Buccheri and Arnaud Macé. The series is public and all are welcome to join. Please feel free to write if you are interested in that or in anything else mentioned here.
Selected Publications
- ‘Empedocles’ Account of Wine (fr.81) and Premodern Oenology’, Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 64.2 (2024), 162–194.
- ‘Artfully False Duals in Empedocles’ Painters Simile (fr. 23)’, Symbolae Osloenses 97.1 (2023), 33–64.
- ‘Dew/Rosée’ and (co-authored with A. Buccheri) ‘Prairies’, in N. Le Meur and J.-P. Guez (eds.), Dictionnaire des images métapoétiques anciennes (forthcoming).