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. The edited volume The Materiality of Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury, 2018) tests the advantages and limits of the so-called new materialisms in the interpretation of drama. 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/

I have finished a new book on comedy and political theory entitled Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis (forthcoming in 2023 from Tangent, Punctum Books), which 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/

I am now finishing another book on tragedy entitled Greek Tragedy in a Global Crisis: Reading through Pandemic Times (forthcoming in 2023 with Bloomsbury). With Sean Gurd, I am co-editing The Before and the After: Critical Asynchrony Now.

With Sarah Olsen, I edited Queer Euripides: A Re-Reading (18 Plays, 20 Readers) (Bloomsbury 2022). For a podcast on the book, see https://www.bloomsburyacademicpod.com/2022/07/queer-euripides-part-one/

With Sarah Nooter another volume entitled Radical Formalism: Reinventing the Literary in Antiquity and Beyond. 

With Andrew Benjamin I am also co-editing a volume on Niobes entitled Niobe's: Antiquity Modernity Critical Theory (under contract with OSU press). 

With Damon Young and Debarati Sanyal, I edited a special issue of Representations entitled Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler. A book entitled Judith Butler and the Ethics of Greek Tragedy is under contract with Bloomsbury for the series Classical Receptions in Twentieth-Century Writing.

I am the chief editor of the journal Classical Antiquity (https://online.ucpress.edu/ca). I also serve on the editorial board of Representations.

With Dan Orrells, I am organizing an international conference on Jean-Luc Nancy and Classics, sponsored by the Rhetoric department, which take place at Berkeley in September 2024.

With Jim Porter, I am also putting together a book on William Kentridge, which is planned to come out in 2025. 

I also write about classics, American literature, and critical theory for "La Domenica del Sole 24 Ore" (https://www.archiviodomenica.ilsole24ore.com/#browsemagazinemonth/10476/05-2020)

Publications

Books 

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

Resistant Form: Aristophanes and the Comedy of Crisis, Tangent, Punctum Books, forthcoming 2022/23

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

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

Niobes: Antiquity Modernity Critical Theory, co-edited with Andrew Benjamin. OSU Press, forthcoming 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eupolis Demoi (Florence, Le Monnier), 2007

Recent and forthcoming articles:

"Medea in the Courtroom: Foucault, Alice Diop, and Abolition." Forthcoming in Arethusa

"Media/Medea: James IJames's Glitchy Counterfactual." Under Review at Classical Receptions Journal

"The Problem with Theory: Classics Critique Postcritique." Forthcoming in Multidisciplinary Theory, edited by Jeffrey Di Leo

"Queer Philology and Luis Alfaro's Oedipus El Rey." Forthcoming in CP (Classical Philology)

"Dystopic Cyberpunk and Heraclitus's River." In Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk 

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

"Chal Chal Chal: Apollonius's Talos Tales (and Medea's). In Radical Formalisms: Reading, Theory, and the Boundaries of the Classical, Bloomsbury

"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, London

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

"Judith Butler's Eurydice," in Proximities: Reading with Judith Butler, edited by D. Sanyal, M. Telo', and D. Young, Representations

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

"Foucault and Oedipal Virality," forthcoming in Symplokê 

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

"Tragic Cryo-Ecology, or Niobe's Glacial Aesthetics," in A. Benjamin and M. Telò, Niobes: Antiquity Modernity Critical Theory (OSU Press, series "Ancient Memories, Modern Identities")

"Suppliant Women. No Labor: Refugees and Queer Adhaesion," in S. Olsen and M. Telò, Queer Euripides (Bloomsbury)

"Queer A(e)di-(m)ology: On Callimachus's Aetia Prologue," forthcoming in Ramus 

"Literary Critical Intensities: Pathos, Affect and Greek Tragedy," in J. Connolly and N. Worman, Oxford Handbook of Ancient Literary Criticism and Theory (OUP)

"Colonial Convulsions: Akram Khan's Xen(os) and the Digital Prometheus," in Greek Tragedy and the Digital (Bloomsbury)

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

"Between Emotion and the Emetic: Francis Bacon and the Tragic Body at the Margins of the Oresteia," Literary Imagination 22, 2020

"The Politics of Dissensus in Aristophanes' Birds" in R. Rosen and H. Foley, Aristophanes and Politics: New Essays (Brill 2020)