Dr. Brooke Holmes

Biography

Brooke Holmes specializes in the history of philosophy and the concepts of behavior, with a particular focus on the ideas of the physical body, nature, and life as they appear in ancient Greek and Roman texts. Her research addresses the ways in which concepts create attempts to theorize agency — ethical and political — within these sources. Additionally, she is deeply interested in the reception of these concepts, especially during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, in continental philosophy. Holmes has worked extensively within the network of Postclassicisms, focusing on the relationship between communities' conceptualizations of the Greco-Roman past and the present. Her areas of specialization encompass ancient Greek medicine and life sciences, ancient philosophy, and Greek literature, particularly works of Homer, tragedy, and Lucretius. She is equally engaged in literary theory, medical humanities, bioethics, environmental humanities, and gender and sexuality studies. Trained as a comparatist classicist in the United States and Europe, she holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Columbia University and both an M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University. Additionally, she has a D.E.A. in Greek Studies from the Sorbonne (Paris-IV). Since 2007, she has taught at Princeton's Department of Classics, served as Director of the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Humanities from 2015 to 2018, and remains an active member of the IHUM Executive Committee and the Executive Committee for Gauss Seminars in Criticism.

Research Interests

Experience