John Liao

""A&S Classics and Classical Civilization (double major)
Supervisor: Seth Bernard, A&S Classics
Dr. Michael Lutsky Undergraduate Award in the Humanities

Zijun (John) Liao is a double-major in Classics and Classical Civilization. Though primarily interested in Imperial Greek intellectual cultures, he is committed to investigating a wide range of questions in Classics using diverse, interdisciplinary approaches. His recent work has implemented statistical and macroanalytic approaches to Greek literature ranging from the Classical period to Late Antiquity: this includes as a 2020 JHI Scholar-in-Residence, where he applied statistical models to collected citations in Athenaeus, and as a fellow at the Digital Humanities Network, where he refined both traditional and macroanalytic analyses in developing a formal classification of title syntaxes for Greek philosophical texts.

Fellowship Project—Bibliographic Labour and the Ancient Utilitarian Text

This project investigates ancient Greek ‘bibliographic’ texts as a site of particular interest for understanding Greek ways of thinking about what constitutes intellectual labour—that is, often in ways that are more aesthetically and ideologically charged than assumed. It will compare Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers with other ancient catalogues as a case study in how the ability of bibliographic texts to be simultaneously ‘utilitarian’ and ‘literary’ may interact with a Greek value sphere to produce ideas about the process of textual (re)production tied to the status of such activities as a form of labour.