Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature
Boris Maslov

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley

Special Interests

Archaic Greek poetry and its reception; the Medieval Christian East; 20th-century Russian prose; comparative poetics; genre and narrative theory.

Boris Maslov’s research centers on Archaic Greek poetry, imperial/Byzantine Greek and Old Russian literatures. Currently he is working on two book projects: one, entitled Pindar and the Emergence of the Literary, investigates the formation of the categories of authorship, poetic image, and literary genre in Archaic Greece; the other traces the history of panegyric and the ode from Pindar to Mandel’shtam. Prof. Maslov is also working on a series of studies on the afterlife of Ancient Greek sociopolitical and ethical vocabulary in Byzantium and among the Eastern Slavs. His broader research and teaching interests include historical, linguistic, and sociological approaches to poetics, comparative conceptual history, philology of cultural import, genre and narrative theory.

Recent Publications:

  • “Comparative Literature and Revolution, or the Many Arts of (Mis)reading Alexander Veselovsky.” Forthcoming in Compar(a)ison: An International Journal of Comparative Literature.
  • Ed., with an introductory note, A. N. Veselovsky, “Envisioning World Literature in 1863: From the Reports on a Mission Abroad,” translation by Jennifer Flaherty, Forthcoming in PMLA.
  • “Pindaric temporality, Goethe’s Augenblick, and the invariant plot of Tiutchev’s lyric” Comparative Literature 64.4 (2012) 356-381.
  • “Oikeiōsis pros theon: Gregory of Nazianzus and the heteronomous subject of Eastern Christian penance.” Journal of Ancient Christianity/Zeitschrift für Antikes Christentum 16.2 (2012) 309-341.
  • “The Limits of Platonism: Gregory of Nazianzus and the invention of theōsis.” Greek, Roman, and Byzantine Studies 52 (2012) 440-468.
  • “The real life of the genre of prooimion.” Classical Philology 107.3 (2012) 191-205.
  • “From (theogonic) mythos to (poetic) logos: reading Pindar’s genealogical metaphors after Freidenberg.” Journal of Ancient Near Eastern Religions 12.1 (2012) 49-77.
  • “Zhitie kak grazhdanstvo: o metaforike politicheskogo v pozdnei antichnosti i Vizantii” [Life as citizenship: on the metaphorics of the political in late antiquity and Byzantium.] Sotsiologicheskoe obozrenie 11.1 (2012) 3-18.
  • “The metrical evidence for pre-Mycenaean hexameter epic reconsidered.” Indoevropeiskoe iazykoznanie i klassicheskaia filologiia XV (2011) 376-389.