Leon Grek

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton, where I study classical Latin and early-modern English literature. I am currently working on a dissertation on Roman comedy and its reception in the English Renaissance, which will combine a comparative study of comic translation in Republican Rome and early-modern London with an account of how Renaissance readers and playwrights understood and made use of the literary history of ancient comedy. This project brings together a number of my broader research interests, including the history of translation and translation theory, literary representation of urban space and topography, the relationship between Renaissance literature and humanist scholarship and the Renaissance cultural reception of the city of Rome.

Originally from Toronto, I received my B.A. in English Literature and Classics from McGill University, and an M.St. from Oxford where I wrote a thesis on forms of narrative and knowledge in Ovid’s Fasti – a poem which continues to fascinate me. Before coming to Princeton I also taught primary school English for a year in Beauvais, France, an experience which gave me a front-line introduction to language teaching and an appreciation for the enduring pedagogical importance of Horace’s crustula (S. 1.25).