Assistant Professor
PhD (University of Chicago)
Contact Information
Email: kenneth.yu@utoronto.ca
Room: LI 126
Bio and Research
Trained as a classicist and historian of religions, my research and teaching interests revolve around ancient Greek religion, the sociology of knowledge in the Second Sophistic, and the knowledge practices that underpin postclassical technical texts. My current book project, which combines these issues, traces the philosophical, scientific, and literary strategies by which ancient intellectuals in genres as diverse as Aristotelian problemata, Homeric scholia, and ancient wonder literature attempted to classify and make sense of a dizzying and ever-expanding array of phenomena related to Greek myth and cult in the Hellenistic and Imperial Greek period.
Recent and forthcoming publications are on Plato’s anxieties about Dionysus in the Laws, Aristophanes’ view of oracles and divination, the hermeneutics of ancient Greek sacrifice, and the historiography of ancient Greek religion. I have held fellowships at the Collège de France, the Hardt Foundation in Switzerland, and the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of Leuven in Belgium.
Specialization: Greek Literature and Religion
Detailed CV and List of Publications