| Articles
After undergraduate studies at the University of Göttingen followed by a year at Oxford University, in 2002 Dr. Grethlein received his Ph.D. from the University of Freiburg summa cum laude in Classics. His prize-winning dissertation, entitled Asyl und Athen. Die Konstruktion kollektiver Identität in der griechischen Tragödie (Asylum and Athens. The Construction of Collective Identity in Greek Tragedy), was immediately published (2003) as a volume in the series Drama. Beiträge zum antiken Drama und seiner Rezeption. In the same year Dr. Grethlein won the multi-year Emmy Noether post-doctoral fellowship funded by the German Research Foundation, one of the most coveted honors for young German scholars in all fields. The first two years of the fellowship, which are intended for further professional training abroad, Dr. Grethlein spent at Harvard University, where he taught a course in Greek tragedy for which he received a Certificate of Distinction in Teaching. Meanwhile work progressed on his second book, which has just been published (2006) under the title Das Geschichtsbild der Ilias. Eine Untersuchung des Geschichtsbildes der Ilias aus phänomenologischer und narratologischer Perspektive (The Iliad’s View of History. An Examination from a Phenomenological and Narratological Perspective). For this book Dr. Grethlein has just won a Heinz Maier Leibnitz Prize from the German Research Foundation, the highest award for German junior scholars working in all fields.
Dr. Grethlein is currently well under way with his new project, “Clio polytropos: Historiography and Non-Historiographic Memoria in Fifth-Century Greece.” Taking up the ideas explored in his Iliad book, he is now focusing on how different ideas of history emerge in accordance with the socio-cultural embedding of literary genres and their narrative forms. In this project Dr. Grethlein seeks to cast new light on the “rise” of historiography by means of a joint examination of the early historians and of poetic and rhetorical accounts of the past. His impressive campus lecture, “The Hermeneutics and Poetics of Memory in Aeschylus’ Persae,” gave an exciting glimpse of some of the early fruits of this project, as do his latest articles—now in excellent English—on historical authors such as Herodotus, Thucydides and Sallust as well as Greek poetry.
Dr. Grethlein, who is not yet thirty and stands to an imposing height, plays competitive tennis and is a veteran volleyball player (his team won the German Youth Championship in 1994). His interests extend to classical and jazz music, cooking and fine automobiles, and we have his personal assurance that he likes a good beach. Can a surfboard be far in the future?
|
