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: https://townsendcenter.berkeley.edu/events/reading-greek-tragedy-judith-butler

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: the Queer Politics of Graeco-Roman Style is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. 

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 and Jim Porter, I am organizing an international conference on Jean-Luc Nancy and Classics, sponsored by the Rhetoric department, which will take place at Berkeley on September 13-14 2024.

With Jim Porter, I am also putting together a book on William Kentridge, which is planned to come out in 2026. 

Publications

Single-Authored Monographs

Edward Said and  the Late Animal: the Queer Politics of Graeco–Roman Style, 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

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

(Dis)enchanted Elementalities, co-edited with Jim Porter, forthcoming in Representations

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):

"Poor or Pure Form: Toward an Epistemology of the Tent," forthcoming in "Form and Its Discontents," special issue of Qui Parle 

"The (Dis)enchantment of Elemental Objects or Dylanologies of Extinction," forthcoming in Representations 

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

"Batrachopolitics for 2024." In Aristophanes' Politics and the Current Moment, edited by C. Güthenke and S. Gartland, Bloomsbury, forthcoming 

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

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

"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)

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

"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.