Dr. Emmanuel Bourbouhakis

Biography

Emmanuel Bourbouhakis is an Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University. He has a diverse educational background, having studied History at Liberal Arts institutions including Concordia and McGill in Montreal. He began his academic career by teaching high school English in post-communist Czech Republic, which deepened his commitment to education. Bourbouhakis earned his M.A. in Classics from the University of Western Ontario and went on to pursue his Ph.D. in Harvard University's Classics department, with a focus on Greek palaeography and Byzantine philology, supported by a fellowship from Freie Universität Berlin and Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. His teaching career includes lecturing at Harvard and a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Freiburg before joining Princeton in 2011. His research covers Byzantine literature and culture, focusing on textual criticism, rhetoric, and the aesthetics of medieval criticism. He published "Not Composed by Chance: Manner: Epitaphios Manuel Komnenos Eustathios Thessalonike" in 2017. Currently, he is working on a monograph about medieval Greek epistolography, highlighting the literary culture of letter-writing in Byzantine society. He teaches various levels of Greek, focusing on classical and post-classical literature, including undergraduate courses such as “Homer and the Modern Self” and graduate seminars on Byzantine historiography. His work aims to illuminate the diversity of Byzantine literary culture and encourages students to explore new dimensions of classical texts.

Research Interests

Experience