Benjamin McCloskey

Email: mccloskey@ksu.edu
Office: 207 Calvin Hall

I teach all areas of the ancient Mediterranean, with special excitement about intellectual history and constructions of gender and ethnicity, especially as responses to imperialism.

My research presently focuses on the intersection of philosophy and historiography in Socratic literature of the 4th century BCE and the impact of narratological approaches on our understanding of philosophy and authority in Xenophon’s corpus. I am working to open up new sites of philosophical discourse about Socratic philosophy by understanding, in particular, how Xenophon attempted to reconcile Socratic philosophy with democracy. Other topics of especial interest are pseudo-historiography in antiquity (into which I would toss Xenophon, ancient novels, paradoxography, and fun plagiarized fake histories like the Historia Augusta) and constructions of gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, especially in the context of Roman imperialism.

Selected Publications

“Xenophon’s Democratic Pedagogy.” Phoenix, 71.3/4. Fall-winter/automne-hiver 2017. 230-249.

“Xenophon the Philosopher: E Pluribus Plura.” American Journal of Philology, 138.4. December 2017. 605-640.

“Achilles' Brutish Hellenism: Greek Identity in the Heroikos.” Classical Philology, 112.1. January 2017. 63-85.

Courses Taught

• HIST 565--History and Culture of Greece
• HIST 566--History and Culture of Rome
• HIST 581--Gender and Sexuality in Greece and Rome
• Full Latin sequence in the Department of Modern Languages