Professor of Classics

Overview

Steve Kidd specializes in Greek literature of the classical and imperial periods, and is especially interested in questions that fall between literary studies and philosophy. He has written Nonsense and Meaning in Ancient Greek Comedy (2014: why does comedy, unlike other genres, gives rise to the perception that some part of it is not meaningful or “just silly”?); Play and Aesthetics in Ancient Greece (2019: what is the relationship between play – in Greek, paidia -- and the arts?); and Lucian on Reading, Performing, and the Difference (2025: when we read, we cannot perform for the world we are viewing, so what is left of us?) Now he writing a book called Imaginary Friends (under contract with Yale University Press), about the often-passionate relationships between readers and writers, from antiquity to today.

Brown Affiliations

On the Web