Christopher Krebs (Department of Classics)

Christopher Krebs

Professor of Classics
Professor, by courtesy, of Comparative Literature
Professor, by courtesy, of German Studies

Christopher B. Krebs studied classics and philosophy in Berlin, Kiel (1st Staatsexamen 2000, Ph. D. 2003), and Oxford (M. St. 2002). He taught at University College Oxford and Harvard before joining Stanford’s Classics department in the summer of 2012, and held visiting positions at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in Munich (see his “You say putator”). The (co-)author of five books and some 75 articles, entries, and reviews, and former editor of Histos (from 2015-17), he is the recipient of the 2012 Christian Gauss Award as well as the 2018 American Journal of Philology Best Article Prize (for his “The World's Measure. Caesar's Geographies of Gallia and Britannia in their contexts and as evidence of his world map”).

He works in the fields of intellectual history, Greek and Roman historiography, and Latin philology: much to his own amazement, he has recently finished a commentary on Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum 7 (a “Green and Yellow” for Cambridge University Press) and is now at work on an intellectual biography of Caesar in the context of the intellectual life of the Roman Republic (W.W. Norton) as well as the Cambridge Companion to Sallust. Other (most recent and forthcoming) work includes “The buried tradition of programmatic titulature among republican historians: Polybius’ Πραγματεία, Asellio’s Res Gestae, and Sisenna’s redefinition of Historiae” (American Journal of Philology), “Greetings Cicero! Caesar and Plato on Writing and Memory” (Classical Quarterly), “Painting Catiline into a Corner. Form and Content in Cic. Cat. 1.1” (Classical Quarterly), “The cart before the horse: Coelius Antipater FRHist 5F41” (Histos), and "Blood on his words, barley on his mind. True names in Caesar's speech for the legendary Barley-Muncher (BG 7.77)" (Classical Quarterly).

He has appeared on television and radio (most recently on Discovery’s Science Channel) and occasionally reviews for the WSJ, the LRB, and the TLS (most recently, “What would Plato have done,” “Before the die was cast”).

He has co-organized and co-teaches the summer program Caesar in Gaul for the Paideia Institute and has taught Greek and Latin at all levels, composition courses, and seminars on Greek and Roman historiography and Latin poetry. In the Autumn, he typically teaches a course on “Great Books, Big Ideas from Antiquity” as part of the Humanities Core (which was reviewed by The Stanford Review), and in the winter a Freshman Seminar on Ancient Rhetoric, its Contemporary Application, and the Art of Speaking Well (“Eloquence Personified”). He regularly offers classes in Stanford’s Continuing Studies program, such as Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War: An Introduction to the Historian, Realist, Philosopher, has co-taught a course on Ancient Rome and its Legacies at Stanford Summer Humanities Institute (covered in the Stanford News), and has offered a course on Rome since 2018 within the same program. In 2016 he started the Historiography Jam, the third meeting of which took place in 2019. He has served as Director of Undergraduate Studies, and, since 2012, on at least one of the following committees every year: undergraduate studies, graduate studies, and graduate admissions. In 2022/3 he will serve as Director of graduate studies.

He is currently co-organizing conferences with Professor Christine Walde (Mainz) on

“Onwards, upwards into the past? Classics in the political discourse

(Methods, Disciplines, Case Studies)”

and with Luca Grillo (Notre Dame), Emily Baragwanath (UNC), and Andrew Feldherr (Princeton) on

"Rhetoric and Historiography: New Perspectives."

 

Contact

Office
Bldg 110, Rm 216