Biography
A.B., Harvard (1974); Ph.D., Harvard (1978). At Columbia since joining the faculty of English & Comparative Literature in 1978, and has also served as the university's Director of Academic Information Systems, and as Executive Director of Information Technology and Adjunct Professor of Management Information Systems at the Business School. Awards include fellowships ranging from the NEH to the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, as well as a Distinguished Teaching Award from Columbia's School of General Studies in 1983. Author of The Traditional Phrase in Homer: Two Studies in Form, Meaning and Interpretation (Brill 1987), as well as articles on Greek, Old English and Old Norse poetry. Additional areas of specialization include ancient and medieval myth and epic (especially Greek, Celtic and Germanic), Indo-European linguistics and poetics (again, especially Greek, Celtic and Germanic, including English), and the narrative strategies of epic. He is nearing completion of a monograph on mythic and poetic traditions in Beowulf, and his current projects involve the mythic and narrative strategies of the Homeric poems and of Walcott's Omeros.
