Xinyuan Lyu

I am a third-year PhD student in Classics. I graduated from Cornell University with a B.A. in Classics and College Scholar Program (magna cum laude) in 2023. My current research interests lie primarily in Ancient Greek literature, critical theory, and reception and translation studies. I am drawn to literary representations and epistemologies of the bodily senses as well as moments when certain conceptual/theoretical analytics fall short, which leads me to explore alternative methods particularly supplied by contemporary critical theories including (post)structuralism, media philosophy, affect and new materialism(s), and cognitive science. Recently I am also thinking about these so-called theories not primarily as methodology or analytics but as reception and translation of Greco-Roman antiquity and beyond. 

I have worked or am currently working on topics such as the dynamics of the triad of sight, knowledge and power in Herodotus and Homer (additionally, through the lens of vulnerability), gendered contradiction between voice and speech in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Lucretius on taste and Lucretian matter as deviance, and Derrida’s recourse to symbolon in his parody of Walter Benjamin’s theorization of translation. I am also involved in a sino-latin translation project where we are currently producing the first English translation of ??? Qiuyou Pian (“On Friendship/On Seeking Friends”), composed in Classical Chinese by the 17th c Italian Jesuit Martino Martini.

• BA Classics, Cornell University, 5/2023