I'm pleased to announce the publication of Volume 34 of Oral Tradition, featuring articles on the South Slavic ballad "The Building of Skadar" ("the most studied ballad in the history of folkloristics," according to Alan Dundes), the use of proverbial discourse in an Akan royal court in Ghana, a Navajo narrative about Coyote and Skunk, and the strategic use of oral discourse in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Read more about Oral Tradition Volume 34
Earlier this year, I published with the Center for Hellenic Studies a new Third Edition of Albert Lord's classic study The Singer of Tales. In this edition I have incorporated some minor corrections into Lord's text, and provided as well a new analytical index, which I hope will provide a useful guide for readers--both those encountering Lord's book for the first time, and those returning to it.
I am honored to have been asked to deliver the annual Helen North Lecture at Swarthmore College. My lecture, “Initiating an Epic, Initiating a Hero: Diomedes and the Iliad,” addresses the role of Diomedes in the Iliad. The lecture will be on Monday, March 26, 2018, at 4:30 pm, in Science Center 199 at Swarthmore College.
I am pleased to be delivering a keynote lecture at the upcoming international conference "Natales grate numeras?," celebrating the 60th anniversary of the Department of Classical Philology at the University of Zadar, Croatia. I will be speaking on "The Odyssey and the Desires of Traditional Narrative."
The Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on the Civilizations of Ancient Greece and Rome will kick off its 2016-17 season with a talk by Dr. Mirko Canevaro on "Majority Rule vs. Consensus: The Practice of Deliberation in the Greek Poleis."
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.
