Brandon Bourgeois is a Lecturer in OSU’s Department of Classics. His primary research interest is the Roman political tradition from the Republic to late antiquity, including political and institutional history, and rhetoric and communication. His dissertation, entitled Roman Imperial Accessions: Politics, Constituencies, and Communicative Acts, surveys and analyses the political history of Roman imperial accessions. His work also maps the gradual shifts in the emperorship’s electoral base (from the Roman Senate to frontier armies and to the Constantinopolitan populace) and ultimately attempts to answer the questions: How did emperors introduce themselves to their subjects and obtain their consent? What were the rhetorical tools of legitimation beyond brute force?
Brandon is also a creative practitioner in the field of classical reception studies. He is the founder and creative director of “The Hype4Homer Project.” The Project translates and adapts ancient Greek epic and lyric poetry from its original language into musical audiobooks and live performance-pieces using the linguistic, cultural, and artistic idioms of contemporary Hip Hop and R&B. The project, while deeply informed by scholarship, offers entertainment in order to advocate for the wider and more inclusive engagement of the general public with the classical world. Currently, the Project is staging performance art adapted from, inter alia, its first full-length work-in-progress: an unabridged translation of Homer’s Iliad into the world’s first Hip-Hop audio book—The Trilliad.
Follow Hype4Homer on Facebook.
Follow Hype4Homer on Twitter.
Visit Hype4Homer’s SoundCloud for a sample recording.
Hype4Homer Press.
Brandon's CV [pdf].*
*[pdf] - Some links on this page are to Adobe .pdf files requiring the use of Adobe Reader. If you need them in a more accessible format, please contact classics@osu.edu.
