Peter T. StruckPeter T. StruckPhD, University of Chicago, 1997
mythology, intellectual history, literary criticism, religion, magic, philosophy
Telephone: 215-898-7425
Email: struck@sas.upenn.edu
Office Hours: TBA
Office: Logan (Cohen) Hall 291
Peter Struck is Associate Professor and Undergraduate Chair of Classical Studies. He received his A.B. at the University of Michigan and his M.A. (Divinity) and Ph.D. (Comparative Literature) from the University of Chicago. His primary research interests are in ancient sign systems, including theories of the sign in literary criticism, in divination through oracles, omens, and dreams, and in medical symptomology. His first book, Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of their Texts (Princeton University Press, 2004), explores how readers of Homer in antiquity found extraordinary insights in his epic poems -- about the gods, the cosmos, and the human place in it. The book was awarded the American Philological Association's C. J. Goodwin Award of Merit, the highest honor for scholarship in the field of classical studies. Professor Struck is currently at work on a study of Greek and Roman divination, titled Divine Signs and Human Nature: An Intellectual History Divination in Antiquity. He has published widely in professional journals on ancient philosophy, religion, magic and divination, and literary criticism.
Professor Struck has taught a variety of classes, at Penn, Ohio State, the University of Chicago, and Princeton, on mythology, religion, magic, literature, philosophy, and theories of language and the sign at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In 2004, he won Penn's Lindback Award, the university's highest award for teaching, and he won the Distinguished Teaching Award from Penn's College of General Studies in 2006. He is currently working with the Teaching Company developing offerings for their Great Courses series.
He has been a member of several ongoing collaborations, including the National Young Faculty Leaders Forum at Harvard University's Center for Business and Government. Since 2003 he has worked as a consultant with the Teagle Foundation on national-level initiatives to promote the liberal arts. He has worked as a media consultant to Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, A & E, and is currently collaborating on developing a series on mythology for the History Channel. Along with Lewis Lapham, he founded Lapham's Quarterly, a general interest publication devoted to history that launched in November of 2007. At Penn, he has directed the Classical Studies Department's Post-Baccalaureate program, served as a faculty fellow at Penn's Hamilton and Stouffer College Houses, and for the academic year 2008-09, he is director of the Penn Humanities Forum 10th anniversary program on "Change."
Struck has held fellowships from the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Whiting Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and has been invited as an eligible scholar by the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.