Emmanuel Bourbouhakis
· Associate Professor of Classics and the Stanley J. Seeger '52 Center for Hellenic StudiesVerifiedPrinceton University · Classics
Active 2003–2024
About
Emmanuel Bourbouhakis is an Associate Professor of Classics at Princeton University and serves as the Acting Director of the Program in the Ancient World. He is a native of the Caribbean and Greece, with an academic background that includes undergraduate studies in History and Liberal Arts at the universities of Concordia and McGill in Montreal. His early teaching experience includes high school English in the Czech Republic, which nurtured his commitment to education. His devotion to Hellenism was confirmed through reading ancient, medieval, and modern Greek literature in Greece, leading him to pursue advanced degrees in Classics, including an M.A. from the University of Western Ontario and a Ph.D. from Harvard University, with additional study at the Freie Universität Berlin and a fellowship at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies. Bourbouhakis has lectured at Harvard and held a DFG post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Freiburg before joining Princeton in 2011. His research interests encompass textual criticism, Greek palaeography, Byzantine literature and culture, rhetoric, historiography, medieval criticism and aesthetics, letter-writing, and the reception of Classical texts in the Middle Ages. His notable work includes the publication of a large-scale study and critical edition of a twelfth-century Byzantine political eulogy, which explores performance, style, and ceremonial contexts in Byzantine court oratory. He is currently working on a monograph about medieval Greek epistolography and has published articles on various subjects related to Byzantine literary culture. Bourbouhakis teaches Greek at all levels, from beginner to advanced, and offers courses on diverse topics, including translation and medieval Greek literature.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Art
- Law
- Literature
- History
- Philosophy
- Classics
- Archaeology
- Epistemology
- Psychology
- Social psychology
- Environmental ethics
- Theology
- Aesthetics
- Art history
Selected publications
John Witherspoon and the Rhetoric of Reputation
Theology Today · 2024
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Theology
The controversy surrounding the statue of John Witherspoon on Princeton's campus has revolved largely around his contentious stance on the gradual abolition of slavery and his presumed ownership of at least two slaves for some indeterminate period. This article is intended to shift the focus to Witherspoon's pedagogical legacy as the more appropriate measure of his place on campus.
The Byzantine Past as Text: Historiography and Political Renewal <i>c.</i> 900
Cultural encounters in late antiquity and the Middle Ages · 2021 · 1 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- History
- Classics
Epistolary Culture and Friendship
BRILL eBooks · 2020 · 17 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Sociology
- Literature
Friendship figures rather prominently in Byzantine epistolary discourse. This chapter considers its function as an enabling motif of letter-writing, as well as some of the reasons why it found its way into a broader cross section of medieval Greek correspondence than one might have assumed on the basis of modern conceptions of affective friendship. Among the aspects examined is that of friendship as a rhetorical ritual in petitions to patrons and the testimony of letters for the significance of friendship in socioeconomic relations which had no official warrant in the political structures of Byzantium. Rather than propose futile criteria for separating sincere from disingenuous invocations of friendship in Byzantine letters, the author proposes an understanding of its role in grounding epistolary exchange in a more broadly conceived social utility.
Speculum · 2020-03-31
article1st authorCorrespondingByzantine and Modern Greek Studies · 2019-09-10
article1st authorCorrespondingAn abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Not Composed in a Chance Manner: The Epitaphios for Manuel I Komnenos by Eustathios of Thessalonike
2017-10-26 · 21 citations
bookOpen access1st authorCorrespondingThe Epitaphios for the emperor Manuel I Komnenos (r. 1143-1180) by the eminent scholar bishop, Eustathios of Thessalonike, is one of the longest and most ambitious political eulogies of the Byzantine era. Delivered during a time of looming political peril at the Byzantine court and composed in a compellingly intricate style, the Epitaphios was meant to serve as both a blueprint for subsequent rulers and as a model of innovative eloquence. The Epitaphios was the culmination of nearly four decades of service to the imperial court and marked an unprecedented effort by one of the empire's most accomplished rhetors to wed epideictic rhetoric to political memorialization. The present book contains a critical edition, translation, and wide-ranging commentary designed to offer a comprehensive analysis of the text and of its enabling literary, ceremonial, and political contexts. Buttressing the edition and translation is a lengthy and detailed commentary which elucidates various features of the funeral oration. It is prefaced by an extensive introduction on various aspects of imperial funerary discourse and ceremony, including the physical setting of the oration, the structural role of orality, as well as aspects of palaeography and editorial method. The overall aim of this study is to exploit the many opportunities afforded by this text to consider the poetics of court oratory at the apex of what is often described as one of the great renaissances of medieval Greek literary culture.
2015-02-17 · 14 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding2014-12-08 · 18 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingEmmanuel C. Bourbouhakis The End of ἐπίδειξις. Authorial Identity and Authorial Intention in Michael Chōniatēs’ Πρὸς τοὺς αἰτιωμένους τὸ ἀφιλένδεικτον was published in The Author in Middle Byzantine Literature on page 201.
Speculum · 2014-04-01
article1st authorCorrespondingHistos · 2014-10-01
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingUniversity of Pennsylvania Press, .Pp. x + .$./
Frequent coauthors
- 1 shared
Julia Hillner
University of Vienna
- 1 shared
Johannes-Preiser Kapeller
University of Vienna
- 1 shared
Des- Poina Ariantzi
University of Vienna
- 1 shared
Alexander Riehle
- 1 shared
Ingela Nilsson
- 1 shared
Danielg Aladza
University of Vienna
- 1 shared
Theodoraa Ntonopoulou
University of Vienna
- 1 shared
Maria Oikonomou-Meurer
University of Vienna
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