Dissertation Defense: Hans Wietzke, "Knowledge in person"

Hans Wietzke, PhD candidate in Classics, presents his dissertation "Knowledge in person: the socio-literary self-fashioning of the Greek expository author".
This dissertation investigates the formal components of authorial self-fashioning in a diverse sample of Greek technical, scientific, and scholarly texts from the Hellenistic and Imperial periods. It argues that beyond its function as a device for asserting generic or didactic authority, the figure of the expository author emerges as a vivid, elite identity that was felicitous in its cultural context. Balancing distant readings of systemic features of authorship with close analysis of particular authors’ practices, the dissertation aims to show how social and literary forces jointly shape how an author is made manifest in text.