Miriam Leonard

Miriam Leonard
Nationality	British
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Cambridge
Thesis	Appropriations of antiquity in contemporary French thought
Academic work
Discipline	Classics,Classical reception studies
Institutions	Bristol University,University College, London

Miriam Anna Leonardis Professor of Greek Literature and its Reception atUniversity College, London.She is known in particular for her work on the reception ofGreek tragedyin modern intellectual thought.

Career

Leonard is the daughter ofDick Leonard,the politician, writer and journalist, andIrène Heidelberger-Leonard,a professor of German literature.Her brother isMark Leonard,the director of theEuropean Council on Foreign Relations.She studied classics atNewnham College, Cambridge,where she gained a BA, MPhil and PhD.Her PhD,Appropriations of antiquity in contemporary French thought,was awarded by theUniversity of Cambridgein 2002.From 2002 to 2007, Leonard worked in the Classics Department ofUniversity of Bristolas a lecturer in Classics and Ancient History,and she moved toUniversity College Londonas a lecturer inGreek literatureand its reception in 2007.Leonard delivered her inaugural lecture onTragedy and Modernityon 1 May 2012.

Leonard's work focuses on the intellectual history of classics from the 18th century to the modern day. Her doctoral work was published asAthens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thoughtin 2005 in which she examined the Paris school of classical scholarship.

Leonard has worked on the use ofGreek tragedyby 19th-20th century writers such asFriedrich Nietzsche,Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,Karl Marx,andSigmund Freud,as a key reference for their work. Reference to Greek tragedy underpinned their use of terminology and the intellectual frameworks they constructed, for example, Nietzsche's use of theApollonian and Dionysianconcept inThe Birth of Tragedyor Freud's introduction of theOedipus complexinThe Interpretation of Dreams.Leonard contends that the continued use of Greek tragedy in modern intellectual concepts has both shaped contemporary culture and has affected modern views of antiquity.Leonard was awarded aLeverhulme Trustgrant in 2011 for her work onTragedy and modernity: from Hegel to Heidegger.In 2012 Leonard was awarded aPhilip Leverhulme Prizein the field of Classics.She presented her work onTragedy and ModernityonABC Radio Nationalin Australia on 8 November 2012.

Leonard lectured onThe Beauty of the Ethical Life: Lacan's Antigoneat theUniversity of Michiganon 4 March 2004.In 2014, Leonard delivered the opening lecture for the joint meeting of the Center for Religious and Interreligious Studies (CRIS) and the Cambridge University Project for Religions in the Humanities (CUPRiH) at Cambridge onJews and Greeks in Nineteenth-Century European Intellectual Thinking.On 14 February 2017, Leonard gave a lecture atPrinceton UniversityonHannah Arendt’s Revolutionary Antiquity.Leonard delivered the 20th Annual Classical Studies Roberts Lecture onClassics and the Birth of Modernityon 16 February 2018 atDickinson College.

Selected publications

• Tragic Modernities(Harvard University Press, 2015)
• ed. with Joshua BillingsTragedy and the Idea of Modernity(Oxford University Press, 2015)
• Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud(University of Chicago Press, 2012)
• ed.Derrida and Antiquity(Oxford University Press, 2010)
• How to Read Ancient Philosophy(Granta, 2008)
• ed. with Vanda ZajkoLaughing with Medusa: Classical Myth and Feminist Thought(Oxford University Press, 2006)
• Athens in Paris: Ancient Greece and the Political in Post-War French Thought(Oxford University Press, 2005)

External links

• Miriam Leonard (UCL staff page)
• Precarious Life: Tragedy and the Posthuman- lecture delivered atPosthuman Antiquities: A Cross-Disciplinary Conference,New York University 14–15 November 2014
• Greek Tragedy in the Modern World- lecture delivered at the School of Advanced Study, University of London 8 March 2013