Research Fields: the Homeric poems, the ancient novel, South Slavic oral epic song
Education: PhD 2005, Harvard University, Comparative Literature.
A member of Harvard’s Classics faculty since 2007, David Elmer holds a PhD from Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature. He is Curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature, a member of the Standing Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology, and an affiliate of the Department of Comparative Literature. He teaches a broad range of courses on the history and interpretation of Greek literature at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Topics of current research include the Homeric poems, the ancient novel, and South Slavic oral epic song. He is the author of The Poetics of Consent: Collective Decision Making and the Iliad (Johns Hopkins, 2013), and editor of the open-access journal Oral Tradition.
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
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