Prof Jason König

Prof Jason König

Professor

Researcher profile

Phone
+44 (0)1334 46 2618
Email
jpk3@st-andrews.ac.uk
Office
S16
Location
Swallowgate

 

Biography

I graduated from Corpus Christi College, Oxford in 1996 with a degree in Classics, and then moved to Pembroke College, Cambridge, to do an MPhil and PhD in Classics between 1996 and 2000. I was a Junior Research Fellow at St John's College, Cambridge in 2000-2002, and have been in St Andrews since September 2002. I was Head of the School of Classics from 2014-2019. I was elected as Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2024.

Teaching

I am happy to supervise in any of the areas listed above under ‘research interests’. Please feel free to get in touch to discuss possible projects at any time. I am particularly keen to work with postgraduate research students on topics within the School’s Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies.

Research areas

My current research has two main strands:

* a series of publications on ecocritical approaches to ancient Greek and Latin literature, including recently published chapters and articles on the representation of human-environment relations in Achilles Tatius, Aelius Aristides, Lucian, Pausanias, Philo and Theodoret; a book in preparation on images of the earth and the surfaces and substances of the earth in the literatures of the Roman empire; and an edited volume in preparation provisionally entitled Ecocritical Classics.

* a series of projects on the history of mountains from antiquity to the present, including an impact project on mountain heritage in Greece (see here for the 'Mountains of Greece' website) and a mythological and historical guidebook to Mount Olympus; also side by side with that a series of collaborations in the interdisciplinary field of mountain humanities, including an edited volume in preparation (jointly with Jonathan Pitches and Jonathan Westaway) entitled An Object History of Mountains and an associated podcast project (see here for the ‘Mountain Stories, Mountain futures’ website).

I am also working among other things on Alciphron's Letters, and on the antiquarian and travel writer Edward Daniel Clarke (1769-1822).

Much of that current work arises from my recently completed Leverhulme Trust Research Project (2017-2023), entitled 'Mountains in ancient literature and culture and their postclassical reception’. Publications include The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture (Princeton University Press, 2022; shortlisted for the London Hellenic Prize 2022), and an edited volume entitled Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2021), as well as a series of publications on representations of landscape in the work of nineteenth-century travellers to Greece.

One of the overarching goals of my work has been to broaden our understanding of the Greek literature and culture of the Roman empire. I have published widely on imperial Greek authors including Dio Chrysostom, Plutarch, Lucian, Pausanias, Alciphron, Pollux, Galen and Philostratus; also on the Greek and Latin novels and on early Christian narrative, especially hagiography. My 2005 book Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire sets literary texts against the background of ancient festivals and gymnasium education. My 2012 book Saints and Symposiasts looks at the literature of feasting and the symposium, with the goal of bringing the Greco-Roman and early Christian literature of the Roman Empire more into dialogue.

A related series of publications aims to take a fresh look at ancient scientific, encyclopaedic and miscellanistic writing; at representations of authority and expertise in the wider context of practices of intellectual self-definition in imperial culture; and at the relationship between late Hellenistic and later imperial Greek literature, in an edited volume entitled Late Hellenistic Greek Literature in Dialogue (CUP, forthcoming 2022; jointly with Nicolas Wiater).

PhD supervision

  • Cameron MacKie
  • Aneirin Pendragon
  • Adam Wilson

Selected publications

 

See more publications