Biography
Dexter Brown teaches broadly in the areas of Classics, Ancient Greek philology, Ancient Judaism, and Early Christianity.
His scholarship explores the little-known intersections of Ancient Greek literature and Ancient Judaism. In the ancient cosmopolis of Alexandria, two communities of literary scholars lived in close proximity: Greek scholars of the Homeric epics and Jewish scholars of the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Torah). These two communities profoundly influenced later forms of literary criticism—together, they shaped much of the history of reading in the Graeco-Roman world. What was the intellectual relationship between them? According to previous scholarship, the surviving Jewish sources have little or nothing to do with the bustling literary critical scene in Alexandria. The Jewish exegetes there were atopoi—“unusual” and “out of place." Against this consensus view, his dissertation shows that from the third century BCE to the first century CE, Alexandrian literary criticism had a fundamental influence on Jewish exegesis. The Jewish literary critics of the Septuagint were well-versed in the interpretative practices of the dominant scholarly culture, and they creatively adapted these practices to their own distinctively Alexandrian commentary tradition. This conclusion opens up new ways of reconstructing the history of both Ancient Greek scholarship and Hellenistic Jewish literature. His current research focuses on the following question: when and why did the idea of authorial intention become central to ancient literary criticism, both Homeric and Mosaic?
His research areas include: Ancient Greek literary criticism, Jews in Ancient Egypt, Hellenistic literature, scholia, Greek papyrology, the reception of Homer and Moses in antiquity, and ancient language pedagogy.
In addition to research, Dexter is passionate about teaching and making the study of ancient languages and literature available to as wide an audience as possible.
