Dr. Alex Dressler

Alex Dressler is committed to the Greek and Roman classics as an evolving canon of texts and methods rooted in the European tradition but aimed at redefining the modern reader’s practical sense of art and life, past and present, and politics and personal flourishing. Focusing on the Roman world, publications include articles on feminism, queer theory, comedy, ancient aesthetics, Roman philosophy, and Michel Foucault. In addition to Greek and Latin in all genres for students at all levels, Alex’s teaching includes courses on Classical and Christian approaches to death and exemplarity, the history of the self in antiquity and modernity, sex and power in Greco-Roman culture, and gender, race, and class in Medieval Latin literature. Alex’s current project, tentatively entitled Marxism and Latin literature: a case study in Roman comedy, uses the early Roman playwright Plautus and his reception in Late Antique and modern contexts to address a longstanding problem in critical sociology, anthropology, and aesthetic theory: the relevance of modern concepts of knowledge, feeling, labor, and class to ostensibly pre-capitalist cultural forms.