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Ahuvia Kahane is a scholar and academic specializing in the study of Greek and Roman antiquity, its traditions and the relations between the ancient world and modern culture and thought. His work addresses questions of form and content, continuity and change, authority and the ethics of literary reflection. Kahane is Regius Professor of Greek (1761) and A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture at Trinity College Dublin. He is a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin and is also a Senior Associate at the Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford.

Kahane has made contributions to the study of ancient epic, orality and oral traditions, literary history, modern poetry and poetics, visual culture, modern art and art history, Hebrew studies, lexicography, sociology and anthropology, translation and translation studies.

Early and personal life: Ahuvia Kahane was born (Dec. 24, 1957) on an agricultural commune (‘Kibbutz’), Ramat Yohanan in the north of Israel to Reuven Kahane (1931-2003), a professor of sociology and education and Orna, née Smirin (1938-), an artist and editor (who, following a divorce, married Magnum photographer Micha Bar-Am, 1930-). Kahane’s grandparents were among the founders of the socialist kibbutzim movement and of two of its most important communities, Beit Alpha, at the foothills of the Gilboa ridge and Kineret on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. His paternal grandfather, David Kahane served in Ben Gurion’s government and later as a director in several large national companies in Israel. His was Professor of Sociology and Saul Robinson Professor of Comparative Education at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and was a leading theorist of informal education whose theoretical work continues to guide hundreds of thousands of members of youth movements.

In 1960, Kahane left the kibbutz with his father, who had re-married the educator Israela Shochat. He attended Rehavia school in Jerusalem and Cornell School in Berkeley, California. As a teenager, Kahane was a member of Mazpen (‘Compass’) a socialist, anti-Zionist political organization. He completed his compulsory service (1976-1979) working as a correspondent and arts critic in the IDF radio and was subsequently discharged from national service. Kahane moved to the UK in 1985. He married Georgina Calvert-Lee, a human-rights and equality-law barrister, in 1992. They have three children, Berenike, Erasmus and Lysander.

Academic career: Kahane studied Greek and Latin in the Department of Classics at the University of Tel-Aviv, working with John Glucker, H. B. Rosen, and other scholars and obtaining a B.A. in 1983. During this time, Kahane also worked closely with many leading artists, poets and writers, writing regular reviews of the arts, editing various works including the Hebrew translations of Daphnis and Chloe (by J. Bronowski) and Polybius’ Histories (by B. Shimron), translating Greek and Latin literature and publishing in literary journals such as Siman Kriah (‘Exclamation Mark’), Achshav (‘Now’) and Prosa (‘Prose’). While an undergraduate he was commissioned by Jerusalem publishers Keter to translate Homer’s epics into Hebrew. Kahane completed his D.Phil. at Balliol College, Oxford (1990 supervised by Jasper Griffin), where, between 1987 and 1990 he was also sometime Lecturer in Classics. During this period Kahane also became associated with the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and began work with N. S. Doniach, OBE and a team of lexicographers at OUP on the Oxford English-Hebrew Dictionary, a project which he co-edited with Doniach and brought to completion in 1996, two years after Doniach’s death. In 1990 Kahane became a Junior Research Fellow at St. Cross College, Oxford and at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and in 1993 a Junior Fellow at Harvard’s Centre for Hellenic Studies. In 1994 he was appointed Assistant Professor of Classics at Northwestern University where he was subsequently tenured as Associate Professor (2000) and later (2003) appointed Chairman of the Department of Classics. During this period Kahane maintained an appointment as Senior Associate at the Centre for Hebrew Studies in Oxford, a position he holds to the present. In 1998, he co-founded (with S. Sara Monoson) the Classical Traditions Initiative at Northwestern, also working closely with the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities. In 2004, Kahane moved back to London to take up an appointment as Professor of Classics at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he was also Associate Director of the University of London Institute in Paris (2006-8), Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre (2005-2011; later the Humanities and Arts Research Institute), Head of the Classics Department (20012-2015) and and Co-Director of the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome (2007-19). Kahane was appointed Regius Professor of Greek (1761) and A. G. Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in 2019 and was made a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin in 2020.

Scholarship: Kahane’s first book, The Interpretation of Order (Oxford 1994) offered some early arguments for the materiality of meaning in early epic diction, at the canonical ‘core’ of ancient literary history and thought. The semantics and lexicon of Homeric verse, the book suggested, were a matter of metrical pragmatics, music and unstable evolutionary verbal patterns. The underlying assumption of the work was that the ‘grammar’ of epic diction was epiphenomenal, ‘evolutionary’ and dependent on material performance rather than on rule-bound or algorithmic systems. This line of thought was developed in later work, including Written Voices, Spoken Signs (Harvard, 1997) and Diachronic Dialogues (Lanham, MD, 2006), leading up to a series of articles (and forthcoming longer work) that eventually explored the relationship between complexity, stochastic, non-deterministic formal interactions and semantic patterning in poetic language and generic traditions. In recent work, drawing on arguments from contemporary science and cognitive functional linguistics Kahane’s later work suggests that almost one hundred years of scholarly disagreement between formalist approaches to orality and oral tradition and approaches that favoured context and semantic nuance could be

Publications: 2016 The Gods in Greek Hexameter Poetry and Beyond, with J. Clauss and M. Cuypers) (Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag). 2012. Homer: Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum/Bloomsbury. Shortlisted for the 2013 Runciman Award) . 2012. Social Order and Informal Codes (in Hebrew), with T. Rappoport (Jerusalem: Resling Publishers). 2011. Antiquity and the Ruin. Revue européenne d'histoire Vol. 18.5-6 (special double-issue). 2005. Diachronic Dialogues: Continuity and Authority in Homer and the Homeric Tradition, in series “Greek Studies, Interdisciplinary Approaches,” (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). 2001. A Companion to the Prologue to Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, with A. J. W. Laird (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 2000. The Chicago Homer, with M. Mueller, C. Berry W. Parod (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University. Unrestricted public access, http://digital.library.northwestern.edu/homer/). Approx 1,000,000 hits p.a.. 1997. Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance and the Epic Text, with E. J. Bakker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 1996. The Oxford English Hebrew Dictionary, with N. S. Doniach (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1996. Homer: Odyssey (in Hebrew. Jerusalem: Keter Publishers). 1994. The Interpretation of Order: A Study in the Poetics of Homeric Repetition (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

External Links: The Chicago Homer, website of the Chicago Homer project.

Ancient Culture Lab: Homer’s Experience and the Greek Languag, Trinity Elective.

Heroic Fate and Homer’s Iliad, The Academy of Ideas.