Research Areas

Greek literature, Ancient Drama and its Reception, Critical Theory (psychoanalysis, queer theory, political theory, posthumanism, and new formalisms)

Biography

In my scholarship, I seek to place antiquity in dialogue with modernity, defamiliarizing and destabilizing widely accepted critical positions by exploring the emancipatory potential of textual and visual form. Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (University of Chicago Press, 2016) theorizes the nexus between canonicity and sensory—especially haptic—materiality.  On the threshold between critique and post-critique, my monograph, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (Ohio State University Press, “Classical Memories/Modern Identities,” 2020), examines how contemporary theorizations of the archive (especially Derrida’s Mal d’Archive) and the death drive (in Freud as well as Bersani, Butler, Edelman, Deleuze, Lacan, Rancière, and Žižek) can help us understand the aesthetic experience of tragedy. Through an engagement with the texts of ancient plays, art (Francis Bacon, Cy Twombly), architecture (Daniel Libeskind), and film, I locate Greek tragedy’s aesthetic allure beyond catharsis in a vertiginous sense of giddy suspension, in a spiral of life-death that resists equilibrium, stabilization, and all forms of normativity. Watch the Townsend book chat that took place on December 9, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mEgL3GhlNw and hear this podcast on the New Books Network: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/new-books-in-literary-studies/id426178886?i=1000506165963. In March 2022, there was a Syndicate symposium on the book, with responses by Karen Bassi, Sean Gurd, Paul Kotman, Helen Morales, and Daniel Orrells: https://syndicate.network/symposia/literature/archive-feelings/

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis (Tangent, Punctum Books 2023) is centered around theoretically engaged readings of Birds, Frogs, Lysistrata and Women at the Thesmophoria as well as the comic style of critical theory. Here is the link to the webpage: https://punctumbooks.com/titles/resistant-form-aristophanes-and-the-comedy-of-crisis/ Here is a podcast on the book: https://tinyurl.com/GurdTelo

Another book Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading through Pandemic Times came out in 2023 with Bloomsbury (finalist for the 2024 Academic Prose Award).  Here is the link to the Townsend book chat with Debarati Sanyal: https://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/media/mario-telo-1

A book entitled Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler  was published in 2024 with Bloomsbury for the series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing.  A conversation with Judith Butler on the book will be held at the Townsend center on November 6, 2024. Here is the You Tube link to the book chat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVsjrNHSxOE

A monograph on Roman comedy and interobjectivity, entitled Roman Comedy against the Subject is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. 

Another monograph entitled  Edward Said and the Late Animal: Classics, Negative Dialectics, and the Limits of Humanism is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 

Here is a descritption of the book (soon to appear on the OUP website):

Edward Said and the Late Animal: Classics, Negative Dialectics, and the Limits of Humanism reconsiders On Late Style, Said’s posthumously published final book, as a model of politically engaged comparativism for classical reception and beyond and poses the question: how can classicists and other literary scholars respond to news and images from Gaza? Radically defamiliarizing texts of Apuleius, Oppian, Ovid, Sophocles, and Seneca and modern iterations in light of works discussed in On Late Style and others chosen for their urgent relevance, this book elevates a menagerie of animals—a donkey, an octopus, a dog, ants, a bull—each one emblematic of Said’s groundbreaking and widely influential notion of aesthetic lateness. In the face of genocidal violence, reading here channels and enacts a sense of intransigence (and eccentricity) while unexpectedly placing Said’s lateness in dialogue with contemporary schools of thought (queer theory, Afropessimism, critical disabilty studies) and excavating the anti-humanist unconscious of Said’s lateness—a product of his sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics and its ramifications for musical theory. An Adornian elaboration of Palestinian unworlding shapes this book’s comparativist method, which contests deep-seated associations of Said with humanism. Not simply cultural-historical or literary-aesthetic, Edward Said and the Late Animal is a manifesto for a critical-theoretical approach to ancient literature and its disturbing resonances with a harrowing present.

I am now engaged in two new projects: one entitled Thrown: Medea and the End of Reproduction and an academic/creative book on Sappho, difficulty and critical theory (together with Lynne Huffer from Emory University.

 I serve on the editorial board of Representations.

Publications

Single-Authored Monographs

The Late Animal: Edward Said, Classics, Negative Dialectics, and the Limits of Humanism, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2026. 

Roman Comedy Against the Subject, Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2025

Reading Greek Tragedy with Judith Butler, Bloomsbury, 2024

Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading through Pandemic Times, Bloomsbury 2023

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis, Tangent, Punctum Books 2023

Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (Ohio State University Press, series "Ancient Memories, Modern Identities"), 2020

Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon (University of Chicago Press), 2016

Eupolis Demoi (Florence, Le Monnier), 2007

Edited Volumes

Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle, co-edited with Paul-Allen Miller

The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now, co-edited with Sean Gurd, Tangent, Punctum, 2024

Niobes: Antiquity Modernity Critical Theory, co-edited with Andrew Benjamin. Ohio State Unversity Press, 2024

Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical, co-edited with Sarah Nooter, Bloomsbury 2024

Queer Euripides: Re-readings in Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury), co-edited with Sarah Olsen, 2022

The Materialities of Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury), co-edited with Melissa Mueller, 2018

Comedy and the Discourse of Genres (Cambridge University Press), co-edited with E. Bakola and L. Prauscello, 2013

Journal Special Issues

Readings in Negative Life, edited by Mario Telo', Discourse 47.2, forthcoming

(Dis)enchanted Elementalities, co-edited with Jim Porter, Representations 168.2, 2025

Shorter and spalding's Iphigenia: Interdisciplinary Readings, co-edited with Helen Morales, Ramus 52.1, 2023

Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler, co-edited with Debarati Sanyal and Damon Young, Representations, 158, 2022

Recent and forthcoming articles (for a complete list, see CV):

"Sappho, 1: Catastrophic Collage and Apostrophic Ending," forthcoming in Arethusa 59.3

"On the Couch: Liberals, Weirdness, and the Fascist Body," forthcoming in DEI and MAGA, edited by S. McClennen and J. Di Leo, Routledge

"Difficulty," forthcoming in Critical Theory: 25 Years Later, edited by S. Chari, R. McGlazer, S. Pandolfo, P. Saha, M. Telò, and H. Zeavin, Fordham UP.

"Johansson's Lamb: Ecohorror's Bestial Capitalism," forthcoming in Discourse 

"Scholiastic Closest Reading and Tragic Intensity," forthcoming in Arion

"Euripides' Hippolytus and Preminger's Laura: The Horror of Stiffness," forthcoming in Bloomsbury Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Classical Reception, edited by R. Armstrong, P. A. Miller,  and D. Orrells

"The Autistic Line in Plautus and Wes Anderson," forthcoming in Parallax

"Nancy Against Lacan: Ovid, Sophocles, Tacita Dean," forthcoming in Jean Luc Nancy's Exscripted Antiquities, edited by Dan Orrells and Mario Telo'

"Whatever," forthcoming in The Lauren Berlant Reader, edited by J.-T. Tremblay, L. M. Jackson, and J. Schroeder, Duke University Press

"The Tragedy of Address: Butler, Palestine, and the Theatricality of Cohabitation," forthcoming in Textual Practice

"Supplication, Speech, Eating: Maurice Blanchot and Niobe in the Iliad (with Ann Smock), Arethusa 59.1, 2026, 1–26.

(with Helen Morales) "Leda's Frantumaglia: Elena Ferrante and the Maternal Death Drive," Classics Beyond the Pleasure Principle, edited by P. A. Miller and M. Telo', Ohio State University Press 2026 171–96. 

"Antigone's Gaza." In The Death Drive, edited by J. Di Leo and P. A. Miller, Bloomsbury 2026, 165–82.

"Between Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Reading the Newest Euripides Fragment," Arethusa 58, 2025, 403–12

"Batrachopolitics for 2024." In Aristophanes and the Current Moment: The Politics of Comedy, edited by C. Güthenke and S. Gartland, 171–94, Bloomsbury 2025.

"Poor or Pure Form: On the Political Aesthetics of the Tent," forthcoming in "Form and Its Discontents," Qui Parle, 34, 2025, 21–40.  

"Dylanologies of Extinction," Representations 168.2, 2025, 64–84. 

"Fear of Flaying: Sontag, Language, Animality." In Sontag's Tangential Classicisms, edited by Laura Jansen, 134–54. Oxford University Press 2025.

"Multidisciplinary Theory in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies," in Multidisciplinary Theory, edited by Jeffrey Di Leo, 27–43. Bloomsbury 2025. 

"Derrida, Blanchot, and the Gimmick: Writing Disaster in Euripides' Bacchae " in S. Gurd and M. Telò, The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now,  241–62 (Tangents, Punctum Books) 2025.

"Before" in S. Gurd and M. Telò, The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now , 15–32 (Tangents, Punctum Books) 2025. 

"Dystopic Cyberpunk and Heraclitus's River." In Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk, edited by Abbi Chen, 171–178. Archive Books 2024.  

"Medea in the Courtroom: Foucault, Alice Diop, and Abolition." Arethusa 56.3, 2023, 413–39. 

"Media/Medea: James IJames's Glitchy Counterfactual." Classical Receptions Journal 16.2, 2024, 229–40

"Queer Philology and Luis Alfaro's Oedipus El Rey." CP (Classical Philology) 119.2, 2024, 149–69. 

"Iphigenia's Stigmatologies," in Shorter and spalding's Iphigenia: Interdisciplinary Readings, edited by H. Morales and M. Telò, Ramus 52.1, 2023, 85–89.

"Improvisational Solidarity: In Conversation with Judith Butler," in Shorter and spalding's Iphigenia: Interdisciplinary Readings, edited by H. Morales and M. Telò, Ramus 52.1, 2023, 13–20. 

"Heraclean Overhaul(s): Par-a-noia, Badiou's Un-thought, and Neurodiversity in Anne Carson's H of H." Classical Antiquity 42.2, 2023, 280–92

"Chal Chal Chal: Apollonius's Talos Tales (and Medea's). In Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical, edited by S. Nooter and M. Telò, Bloomsbury 2024, 248–64. 

"Ancientmodern Objects: Viewing Freud's Oedipus Complex." In Freud's Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire, edited by R. Armstrong, M. Leonard, D. Orrells, Publications of the Freud's Museum, 79–88.

"Queer Interspeciesism, or Oppian's Wild Loves," in The Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory, edited by Sara Lindheim, Kirk Ormand, and Ella Haselswerdt, Routledge 2023, 423–36. 

"Foucault and Oedipal Virality," Symplokê 30.1–2, 2022, 383–93. 

"Niobe's Cryo-Ecology," in A. Benjamin and M. Telò, Niobes: Antiquity Modernity Critical Theory (OSU Press, series "Ancient Memories, Modern Identities") 2024, 85–97.  

"Suppliant Women. Adrastus's Cute Lesbianism: Labor Irony Adhesion," in S. Olsen and M. Telò, Queer Euripides, Bloomsbury 2022, 86–98. 

"Queer A(e)di-(m)ology: On Callimachus's Aetia Prologue," Ramus  51.1, 2022, 21–46. 

"Colonial Convulsions: Akram Khan's Xen(os) and the Digital Prometheus," in Greek Tragedy and the Digital, edited by G. Rodosthenous and A. Poulou, 182–98 (Bloomsbury)

"Laughter, or Aristophanes' Joy in the Face of Death," in P. Swallow and E. Hall, Aristophanic Humour (Bloomsbury 2020), 53–68. 

"Between Emotion and the Emetic: Francis Bacon and the Tragic Body at the Margins of the Oresteia," Literary Imagination 22.2, 2020, 109–20.