Michael Russo

Education

I earned my bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Emory University, then studied Classics at Columbia University before coming to the University of Pennsylvania as a PhD student.

Research Interests

Some of my interests include early Greek poetry and philosophy, Greek tragedy, ancient literary criticism and theory, rhetoric, and aesthetics. More recently, I have been thinking about how early attempts to account for the formation and consistency of the natural world might have informed, and perhaps continue to inform, later ideas about what literature is and does. This speaks to a broader interest in the creative entanglement between the human mind and the natural world, which has led me to such diverse areas of research as the ancient senses, materialisms both ancient and modern, and various strains of ecological thought, including ecocriticism and ecolinguistics.