2026-2027 Sather Professor

Yopie Prins

Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan
 

Spring 2027 Sather Series:  Sappho Echoes

An exploration of Sappho as an acousmatic figure within the context of twentieth-century music, sound studies, and lyric theory. 

Lecture 1: Prelude
January 28 • 7 pm  

Lecture 2: Voice
February 11• 5.30 pm
308A Doe Library

Lecture 3: Lyre
February 25 • 5.30 pm
308A Doe Library

Lecture 4: Bracket
March 11 • 5.30 pm
308A Doe Library

More about Yopie Prins

After earning her PhD at Princeton University in 1991, and following a stint as Assistant Professor at Oberlin College, Yopie Prins joined the faculty of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Michigan in 1994, where she is currently Irene Butter Collegiate Professor of English and Comparative Literature and (since 2015) affiliated faculty in Classical Studies. Prins’s scholarship embraces classical reception studies, nineteenth-century poetry and historical prosody, comparative poetics and lyric theory, critical translation studies, and gender studies. Beyond her scores of articles and book chapters ranging across these topics, Prins has published two award-winning books that are each in their own way milestones in modern scholarship on Victorian classical reception, Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (2017). Prins’s range is clear from her work as the co-editor of several collections, including the pathbreaking Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (2014), and as the translator or co-translator of Dutch poetry and fiction. In addition to the many honors garnered by her books, Prins’s scholarship has been recognized with fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Guggenheim Foundation and by numerous invitations to give keynote lectures at conferences nationally and internationally.