James M. Redfield

Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor, the Committee on Social Thought, and the Department of Classical Languages and Literatures.
The University of Chicago
SS Box 94, 1126 East 59th Street
Chicago, Illinois 60637
Phone: 773-702-8592
Office: Harper Memorial West 604
jmredfie@midway.uchicago.edu.  

EDUCATION

1954 B.A., The University of Chicago
1956-57 Woodrow Wilson Fellow
1956-58 Advanced Student, New College, Oxford
1961 Ph.D., Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago. (Thesis: Plato and the Art of Politics. Supervisors: David Grene, Antony Andrewes)

ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS

1976-present: Professor, Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; Professor, The College, University of Chicago; in the Humanities and in the New Collegiate Division

1977-present: Professor, Department of Classical Languages and Literature, University of Chicago; Member, Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World; Associate Member, Department of Anthropology

1965-75: Associate Professor, Committee on Social Thought and in the New Collegiate Division

1962-65: Assistant Professor, Committee on Social Thought

1960-62: Instructor, Committee on Social Thought

RESEARCH GRANTS

1970-71 National Endowment for the Humanities Younger Scholars (Independent research in Italy and England)

1980-81 American Council of Learned Societies (Independent research in Chicago, Greece, Italy and France)

1986 Martha Sutton Weeks Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center

1989 NEH Travel to Collections Grant: Reggio Calabria

1990 & 1992 Topographical research for the Isthmia Excavations (Principal Investigator, Elizabeth Gebhard)

VISITING APPOINTMENTS AND SPECIAL LECTURESHIPS

1977 Charles Lectures, Earlham College: "Disputing About Values"

1980 Visiting Professor of Classics, Dartmouth College (Summer)

1981 Gildersleeve Visiting Professor, Barnard College.

1983 Sibley Lecture, Alfred University

1988 Wood Lecture, University of the South (Sewanee)

1990 University of Toledo: "The Origins of Philosophy" (three lectures)

FOR THE AMERICAN PHILOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, ARCHEOLOGICAL INSTITUTE OF AMERICA

1975 "Techne and Phusis in the Philoctetes"

1976 "Homeric Syntax: A Computer Application"

1979 "The Locrian Women" (Women's Caucus); "Notes on the Metapontion Land System" (Joint meeting with the Modem Greek Association)

1980 "Odysseus the Bridegroom"

1981 "A Cup not Nestor's"

1987 Respondent, APA/AIA joint panel

1990 "Wedding Doll Dedications at Locri" (AIA)

1993 Chaired session on Homer.

LECTURES

Other scholarly presentations on one or more occasions at:
American Anthropological Association; California Classical Association; Social Science History Association; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Liberty Fund (Windsor Castle Symposium); International Congress of Historical Sciences (Madrid); World Classical Association (Quebec meeting); American University in Cairo; Centre pour recherches comparées en sociétés anciennes (Paris); Scuola Normale di Pisa; Université de Genève; Université de Lausanne; Università degli Studi, Lecce; ; Montieth (Wayne State); Oakland (Michigan); St. John's (Annapolis); Lawrence; Princeton; Yale; Texas (Austin); St. Mary's; Valparaiso; West Virginia; Colorado College; Grinnell; Wellesley; USC; Beloit; Brandeis; Gustavus Adolphus; Toledo; Haverford; Santa Clara; San Francisco State; Kansas; Wabash; Stanford; Illinois Wesleyan; Brown; Texas (El Paso); Augustana; Johns Hopkins; California (Berkeley); Marquette; Puget Sound; University of Washington; Allegheny; Franklin and Marshall; West Virginia

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS (Except book reviews)

1975 Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (The University of Chicago Press); translated as La Tragedie d'Hector: Nature et Culture dans l'Iliade (Flammarion, 1984; preface by J.-P. Vernant); also published in modern Greek and Spanish. Second, expanded edition, Duke University Press, 1994.

1988 Translator of Phillippe Borgeaud, Recherches sur le dieu Pan published as The Cult of Pan in Ancient Greece (The University of Chicago Press), with Kathleen Atlass.

In Progress: The Locrian Maidens, an inquiry into the culture and religiosity of Epizephyrian Locri in the classical age.

1963-65 "A Lecture on Plato's Apology," The Journal of General Education, 1963; with a reply to a reply, "Socrates and Mr. Bosmajian," JGE, 1965.

1963 "Comedy, Tragedy, and Politics in Aristophanes' Frogs," Chicago Review; also in German translation in Antaios, 1963.

1964 Select Athenian Inscriptions, translated with introduction, notes, and vocabulary. University of Chicago syllabus (with Thomas Conley).

1967 "The Making of the Odyssey," in Essays in Western Civilization, ed. Botstein and Carnovsky; reprinted in Parnassus Revisited, ed. A. Yu (1973).

1968 "Ueber die Odysee," Antaios.

1978 "The Women of Sparta," Classical Journal.

1979 "The Proem of the Iliad: Plato's Art," Classical Philology.

1979 "Foreword" to Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans, (Johns Hopkins University Press).

1981 "Speech as a Personality Symbol: The Case of Achilles" (with Paul Friedrich), Language; with a reply to a reply, "Contra Messing" (with Paul Friedrich), Language, 1981.

1981 "Reply to Vellacott," Carleton Miscellany.

1982 "Notes on the Greek Wedding," Arethusa.

1983 "The Economic Man," in Approaches to Homer, ed. Rubino and Schelmerdine (University of Texas Press).

1983 "Louis Gernet" (review article), American Journal of Philology.

1984 "Warfare and the Hero in the Classical World," Laetaberis.

1985 "Herodotus the Tourist," Classical Philology.

1985 "Le sentiment homerique du Moi," Le Genre Humain.

1985 "An Aristotelian Analysis of Miss Moppet," Chicago Review.

1986 "The Development of the Market in Archaic Greece," in The Market in History, ed. Anderson and Latham (London: Croom Helm).

1986 "Paul Friedrich: Ethnographer as Poet and Poet as Ethnographer," Dialectical Anthropology.

1987 "Commentary on Humphreys and Raaflaub," Arethusa.

1990 "From Sex to Politics: The Rites of Artemis Triklaria and Dionysus Aisymnetes at Patras," in Before Sexuality, ed. Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin (Princeton).

1990 "Drama and Community: Aristophanes and Some of His Rivals," in Nothing to Do With Dionysus, ed. Winkler and Zeitlin.

1990 "J.-P. Vernant: Structure and History" (Review article), Journal of the History of Religions.

1991"Anthropology and the Classics," Arion.

1991 "The Politics of Immortality," Recherches et Rencontres.

1993 "The Sexes in Hesiod," in Reinterpreting the Classics, ed. Stray and Kaster = Annals of Scholarship vol. 10.1

1994 "Homo Domesticus," in The Greeks, ed. J.-P. Vernant (University of Chicago Press); first published in Italian in Uomo Greco, 1991 (Laterza); also published in French, Spanish, and German, and Portugese.

1994 "The End of the Republic: Plato's Myth of Er," forthcoming in the proceedings of the Cartigny conference on the Idea of the Person in Antiquity (1993).

Forthcoming: "Thucydides' Argument with the Facts," in Essays . . . Weintraub.

Forthcoming: "Plato's Apology of Socrates: A Vernacular Translation."

TEACHING

NEH Seminars:

1983 NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers, Dartmouth College. "Homer: Text and Context."

1984 NEH Summer Seminar for Secondary School Teachers, Dartmouth College. "Homer."

1985 NEH Summer Seminar for College Teachers, Dartmouth College. "Homer: Text and Context."

University of Chicago (1960-present):

Introductory undergraduate courses (Core Humanities, Core Social Sciences, Introductory and Intermediate Greek);

Undergraduate and graduate courses (ancient and modern literary texts, ancient philosophical texts, ancient history, philology, prose stylisitcs);

Graduate seminars and workshops

Interdisciplinary and joint teaching: Plato's Republic, with Herman Sinaiko; Sophocles, with David Grene; Joyce's Ulysses, with Saul Bellow; Aristotle's De Anima, with Eugene Gendlin; Homeric Language, Homeric Culture, with Paul Friedrich; Comparative Poetics, with Edward Dimock, Anthony Yu, and Edwin Gerow; Philosophy of Discourse, with Ranlet Lincoln; Rhetoric, with James White; Early Colonies in the Western Mediterranean, with Lawrence Stager; Culture and History, with Marshall Sahlins; Greek Institutions, with Ira Mark; Archaic Archaelogy, with Elizabeth Gebhard; Joyce's Ulysses, with Wayne Booth; War and Peace and the Iliad, with Milton Ehre.

1965 & 1987: Quantrell Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching.

Associate Editor: Classical Philology

LANGUAGES

Ancient Greek; read, speak and write Italian; read and speak French and Modern Greek, some Spanish; read German.

ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE

1965-70 Founding Master of the New Collegiate Division and Associate Dean of The College (this Division of The College was created to encourage faculty curricular initiative and student independence).

1968-70 Chairman, Committee on Social Thought.

1976-77 Director, NEH grant for the "Early Greek Studies Project" (project created the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World at The University of Chicago).

1982-85 Master, Collegiate Division of the Humanities, and Associate Dean of The College and of the Division of the Humanities (responsible for opening the Language Resource Center and starting the first Chicago programs for study abroad).

1983-85 Acting Master, New Collegiate Division, The University of Chicago (launched the "Fundamentals: Issues and Texts" Program in the Division with a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities).

1993-present Chair, Committee on the Ancient Mediterannean World.

PUBLICATIONS ON EDUCATION

1965 "The Sense of Crisis," in New Views of the Nature of Man, ed. Platt (University of Chicago Press).

1967 "Platonic Education," in The Knowledge Most Worth Having, ed. Booth (University of Chicago Press).

1968 "Notes Arising from Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi," Agore.

1968 "The College, the University, and the New Collegiate Division," Midway.

1969 "The Teacher's Role in Liberal Eduation," Perspectives.

1973 "Committee on Tradition and Innovation: Chairman's Report," The University of Chicago Record.

1976 "Aristophanes' Clouds: Education between the Generations," The Journal of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions.

1976 "Scholarship as a Vocation," The University of Chicago Magazine.

1982 "The Calling of Social Science," The Humanities Today: The Reynolds Lectures.

1987 "The Politics of Language Instruction," in The Governance of Foreign Language Teaching and Learning, ed. Patrikis; republished in the ADFL Bulletin (1989).

1988 "Notes of a Native Speaker," in Language and Liberal Education, ed. Patrikis.

1988 "Protagoras Ph.D.," (with Herman Sinaiko) in Teaching Undergraduates, ed. Kimball.

1988 "Invasive Procedures," "Mentoring," "The Price of Everything," and "Maintenance" (commencement addresses), The Universitv of Chicago Record.

1990 "Dialogue on the Midway: Robert Hutchins and his University," Change.

CONSULTING

Planning Group and Teaching Faculty of the Colorado Springs Workshop in Liberal Education funded by the Danforth Foundation and later by the Lilly Endowment, nearly every year from 1969 to 1981.

For the National Endowment for the Humanities: in-house panels; consultancies at the University of Colorado, Loyola (New Orleans), Brown, Puget Sound (NEH Visiting Scholar for the Fall semester, 1986), Washington (St. Louis), Notre Dame; and advisor on the NEH-funded project carried out by the National Radio Theater to adapt the Odyssey for radio (Peabody Award).

1968-69 Haverford College Visiting Committee.

1974 Faculty retreat for Sangamon State (with Ranlet Lincoln).

1974 Outside evaluator, State College of New York at Purchase.

1980-81 Hampshire College Ten-Year Review.

1984 Outside examiner, Kenyon College.

1985 Outside evaluator, Department of Humanities, Wayne State.

1989 English Department review, College of St. Catherine.

1987-88 Accreditation Visits for the North Central Association: Iowa, 1987; Oberlin, 1988; University of Arizona, 1990; University of Indiana and Purdue in Indianapolis, 1992.

Talks on topics in higher education on one or more occasions for:
Danforth Associates; American Association for Higher Education; Association of Academic Deans; Lilly Post-Doctoral Conference; Board of the Board of Governors System (Illinois); Center for the Study of Higher Education (Berkeley); American University in Cairo; Wooster; Western Michigan; Valparaiso; Carlton; Brown; Bradley; Cardinal Stritch; Indiana; Rockford; Emory and Henry (Reynolds Lecturer); Hofstra; Grand Valley; Northem Illinois; Puget Sound; William Patterson; Montclair; Purdue

CREATIVE WRITING AND THEATRICALS

Board Member, Executive Secretary, Senior Director, and Guarantor of the "Last Stage" (a Chicago loft theater), 1963-67

Works by Redfield produced at The Last Stage: Vlach, 1966; Aristophanes' Clouds, a translation and adaptation 1962 (also produced by University Theater, The University of Chicago, 1987); Aristophanes' Frogs, a translation and adaptation, 1964 (also produced by University Theater, 1989).

Continuing theatrical work as actor and director with University Theater.

Published and unpublished plays, poetry, and fiction.

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