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Niall W. SlaterSamuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek

Biography

Determining that acting was too hard a way to make a living, Niall W. Slater opted for the leisure of the theoried class. After receiving a B.A. from The College of Wooster and a Ph.D. from Princeton, he taught at Concordia College (Moorhead, Minnesota) and the University of Southern California before arriving at Emory. He served as chairman of the department 1991-1994, then later as director of Emory’s Center for Language, Literature, and Culture. He received the Emory Williams Award for Distinguished Teaching at Emory in 1999 and was named the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Latin and Greek in 2004.

His research interests include the ancient theater and its archaeology, the ancient novel, gender studies, and recently warfare and its cultural impacts. His books include Euripides: Alcestis (in the Bloomsbury Companions to Greek and Roman Tragedy series); Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002); Reading Petronius (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); and Plautus in Performance: The Theatre of the Mind (Princeton University Press, 1985). His translations of various Middle and New Comedy poets are included in The Birth of Comedy:  Texts, Documents, and Art from Athenian Comic Competitions, 486–280, edited by Jeffrey Rusten (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). He is a past president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South as well as past president of the national Phi Beta Kappa Society.