Dustin Dixon

Dustin Dixon teaches courses on the literature and culture of ancient Greece as well as Greek and Latin courses from the elementary to the advanced levels. He regularly teaches first-year Greek, and his past courses have focused on ancient drama; Athenian political culture; classical mythology; Greek religion; Homeric epic; and the reception of classics in early modern drama, horror films, and the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

Professor Dixon researches and writes about ancient drama, fragmentary texts, performance, and classical receptions. He is author of Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (co-authored with John Garrison; Bloomsbury, 2021), which explores the dynamics of depicting classical divinities onstage in ancient Greece and Rome and in early modern England. He is editor of The Spirit of Aristophanes (co-edited with Mary English; Edinburgh University Press, 2024), a wide-ranging collection of new studies of the comic poet Aristophanes and his influence on literature from fifth-century drama to the Roman novel. His next book, with a working title Ancient Comedy and the Remaking of Myth, explores the preserved fragments of comedies with mythological subjects. This book brings together recent developments in textual criticism and performance studies in order to explore how the comic poets remade myth and engaged their audiences in debates about the fraught role of the past in the present. His articles appear in Classical Philology, Classical Quarterly, and Classical Receptions Journal.

He has been awarded fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the British Academy, the DAAD (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst), the Institute of Classical Studies at the University of London, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation.

Before coming to Grinnell, Professor Dixon taught at Emory University and Loyola University Maryland. He earned his Ph.D. from Boston University and his B.A. from Northwestern University.