We are pleased to welcome Micha Lazarus, who joins Byzantine Studies as a one-month research award recipient this March. Lazarus is a Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, working on the influence of classical poetics on Renaissance English literature.
Lazarus received degrees from Oxford (BA Hons), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and the University of California, Berkeley (MA), before returning to Oxford for a DPhil on the reception of Aristotle’s Poetics in Renaissance England, several decades before it is usually thought to have become available. Since then he has taught Renaissance literature at both Oxford and Cambridge, and is expanding his thesis into a monograph for Oxford University Press. His work at Dumbarton Oaks will explore Greek imperial and Byzantine rhetoric as the dominant disciplinary context through which the Poetics circulated in Renaissance Europe for the first fifty years of its life in print.
Micha has published several articles on Renaissance literature and criticism, new manuscript discoveries, and the classical tradition, focusing in particular on the influence of Greek in sixteenth-century England. In 2012, he was awarded the Gordon Duff Prize in book history, and, in 2016, held a research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, for work on Aldus Manutius. He is coinvestigator on English Renaissance Poetics Online, a digital project mapping the influence of classical and Renaissance poetics in English writing from 1500 to 1700, and this year is convening “Poetics before Modernity,” a seminar series exploring new work on Western literary theory from its ancient beginnings to 1700.