bholmes@princeton.edu
Brooke Holmes is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics and the Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism; she previously directed the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy, as well as over fifty articles, and the co-editor of six volumes. She has held fellowships most recently from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and the Center for Ballet and the Arts at New York University. Her book Tissue of the World: The Nature of Ancient Sympathy will be published by The University of Chicago Press in Spring, 2027.
She will serve as an Old Dominion Research Professor in the Humanities Council in 2026-27. During her appointment as an Old Dominion Research Professor, she will be pursuing two projects. First, she is developing a research project entitled “An Archive of Knots: The Afterlives of Ancient Sympathy,” which follows the diasporic development of the concept of ancient sympathy (sumpatheia) through a series of case studies situated in the first half of the first millennium ce in an interconnected Afro-Eurasian world. She hopes to develop the project into a book alongside an exhibition. She will also advance work on a book-length project that examines how modern appeals to ideas about life, human nature, and Nature in ancient Greece have informed the development of secular ethics over the past two centuries through the imbricated traditions of vitalism, naturalism, and Philhellenic classicism.
Read her full biography on the Department of Classics website.
