Last Year's Work
It seems like it’s customary among academics these days to provide a survey of things done in the past year, publications and the like. But by far my most consequential “publication” this year was non-academic, nor was I even the lead author—credit for that goes to my wife, Kristin (I was more of a lab assistant). And that was my daughter, Tabitha Calliope Priou, born August 26th and pictured below with her sister, Penelope.
Ok, now that the obligatory and reluctant sentimentality is out of the way, on to the wholly voluntary self-promotion.
First up is a collection of essays by the late Laurence Berns, a teacher of sorts to me during my brief stint at St. John’s College in Annapolis. He passed away in 2011, leaving behind a plan for a collection of previously published pieces. I edited them and wrote, as best I could, an introduction suited to his plan. The volume came out this November from Paul Dry Books. You can purchase it from Amazon or, preferably, from the publisher. And if you’re on the fence, give my introduction a read for a sense of its contents.
I didn’t have any articles or book chapters come out, though a few are slated to come out next year: essays on Plato, Strauss, Parmenides and Homer, John Berryman and Hesiod, perhaps others. I did post a couple drafts of papers, the most important of which is “Leo Strauss and the Academy.” There I attempt to work through Strauss’s most consequential political act, the founding of a school of thought. As someone educated in this school, I found that pursuing this line of inquiry was much more personal, in the sense of providing a degree of self-knowledge, than most of the other things I’ve worked on in recent years. I also posted “Nature, Education, and Freedom,” though I’m in the process of making changes to that right now, most importantly by revisiting Locke’s works on education.
I had two book reviews come out. One was “Beyond Law and Poetry,” a longer review essay of two Festschriften, one for Ronna Burger and the other for Michael Davis, both teachers and mentors of mine. That was published in Polis. The second was a review of Ann Ward’s The Socratic Individual, for The Review of Politics.
Of course, there’s also The New Thinkery, the podcast I co-host with Greg McBrayer and, occasionally, David Bahr. It comes out weekly, so it would be too much of a task to list all of the episodes here. Among them are discussions of Rousseau, Plato, Homer, Locke, Strauss, Plutarch, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Xenophon, Nietzsche, Augustine, Weber, Shakespeare—and that’s just with a quick glance, and with no mention of all our guests, whom I won’t start naming, out of fear I’ll offend somebody by leaving them out. But keep your eyes on our twitter and website, as we’ll be putting together a sort of syllabus of all the topics and guests, for an easy overview of what we’ve done. Also, please consider supporting us with a small donation—we do this all for free. And thanks, as always, to our producer, Jake “The Cannon” Gannon.
I also did a handful of other people’s podcasts. I’m particularly proud of my conversation with Shilo Brooks on Plato’s Republic for The Free Mind, a podcast produced by the Benson Center here at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I also had a wide-ranging and thoughtful conversation with Emmet Penney for his podcast, ex.haust, about Strauss’s “Three Waves of Modernity.” Finally, I had two conversations on Plato’s Symposium for Ancient Greece Revisited. I also recorded two other podcasts, which should come out early next year, one on progress and modernity for Narratives and one on Strauss on how to read Plato for Moral Imagination. I’ll share those once they’re out.
Also: a couple substack posts, though not as many as I’d have liked: Strauss and Farabi, quotes from Montesquieu on Rome, and, closest to my present work, “Plato’s Republic in its Thucydidean Context.”
Lastly, I gave a number of presentations and talks. I’d like to thank Neil Rogachevsky again for having me out to Yeshiva University to talk about Plato’s Republic. Also, thanks to the Northeastern Political Science Association for awarding me the Wilson Carey McWilliams Best Faculty Paper in Political Theory award for my paper “Olympus as Hades: Plato and the Homeric Parmenides,” hopefully coming out in an edited volume soon. You can read it here.
What’s in store for next year?
I’ll have two monographs coming out, a holistic treatment of Socrates’ scientific trial in Plato’s Theaetetus, Sophist, and Statesman with Mercer University Press and a short series of notes or musings on Plato’s Symposium with Political Animal Press.
I also have plans to write and present on Plato’s Symposium, Republic, and Strauss.
More soon…