Within Greek and Roman literature, Professor Payne has worked on lyric and didactic poetry, comedy, and Hellenistic poetry. More broadly, he is interested in animal and plant studies, primitivism ancient and modern, and, most recently, speculative fiction. He has published three books: Theocritus and the Invention of Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2007); The Animal Part: Human and Other Animals in the Poetic Imagination (The University of Chicago Press, 2010), winner of the 2011 Warren-Brooks Award for Outstanding Literary Criticism; and Hontology: Depressive Anthropology and the Shame of Life (Zero Books, 2018). His new book Flowers of time / On post-apocalyptic fiction will be published by Princeton University Press in 2020. Professor Payne has also written a foreword to poet Stephanie Burt’s After Callimachus for the Lockert Poetry in Translation series.
Recent Publications
- 2019. “Shared life as chorality in Schiller, Hölderlin, and Hellenistic poetry.” In Antiquities Beyond Humanism, edited by Emanuela Bianchi, Sara Brill, and Brooke Holmes. Oxford: Oxford University Press: Classics in Theory series: 141-58.
- 2018. “Poetry, vegetality, relief from being.” Environmental Philosophy 15.2. DOI: 10.5840/envirophil20184965
- 2018. “Fidelity and farewell: Pindar’s ethics as textual events.” In Textual Events, edited by Felix Budelmann and Tom Phillips. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 257-74.
- 2017. “What’s an ark?” Relegere: Studies in Religion and Reception 7.1: 1-19.
- 2017. “Centaur.” In liquid antiquity, edited by Brooke Holmes. Athens: DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art: 120-23.