Leslie Kurke has specialties that span archaic and classical Greek literature and cultural history, with particular emphasis on archaic Greek poetry in its social context, Herodotus, and early prose. She is fascinated by the various interactions of word and world, literature and its “others”: the economics of literature, poetry and/as ritualization, text and popular culture, and the dialectic of performed song and place/monuments. She is the author of The Traffic in Praise: Pindar and the Poetics of Social Economy (Cornell UP, 1991), Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of Meaning in Archaic Greece(Princeton UP, 1999), and Aesopic Conversations: Popular Tradition, Cultural Dialogue, and the Invention of Greek Prose (Princeton UP, 2011).
Kurke is the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship (1999-2004) and the Goodwin Award for best book in the field of Classics (2013, for Aesopic Conversations). She is currently completing a book, co-authored with Richard Neer, entitled Pindar’s Sites: Song and Space in Classical Greece. (Ph.D., Princeton University).