This book has emerged out of a swarm of friends, colleagues, and adversaries. I am grateful to Melissa Browne and Ryan Warwick, who invited me to give the Poultney Lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 2018. And at Hopkins, to Emily Anderson, Silvia Montiglio, Josh Smith, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Christopher Cannon, Alex Lewis, and Giacomo Loi, for their engagement with my arguments. I thank Susan Lape, Daniel Richter, Greg Thalmann, and their colleagues and students in the Classics Department at USC, and Jody Valentine, of Pomona College, for their generosity. Aimee Bahng, David Roselli, and Ellen Finkelpearl, when I gave the Harry Carroll Lecture at Pomona College, shared stimulating questions and responses. Ellen O’Gorman and Ahuvia Kahane invited me to a meeting at Royal Holloway in London to discuss the work of Jacques Rancière, where I met with generous hospitality and some bracing resistance. Even though we sometimes disagree, Edith Hall, who has done so much to further the politics of the study of the classics, and comedy, has my profound gratitude and admiration. I thank her, Henry Stead, and Tom Geue for their kind invitation to confer about the sublime at a stimulating event at King’s College London. My visit to Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, gave me a chance to present my work in progress, and I acknowledge Christopher Grundke, Eli Diamond, and Hilary Ilfak for their generosity. Princeton University’s Classics Department invited me to deliver the Faber Lecture in 2019, and I very much appreciated the hospitality and responses of Johannes Haubold, Andrew Feldherr, Barbara Graziosi, Kay Gabriel, and Dan-El Padilla Peralta. The warm welcome of Donald Ainslie, Victoria Wohl, and Kenny Yu at the University of Toronto, when I was invited to present the Stubbs Lecture in 2019, gave me the impetus to pursue new questions. I thank Ken Reinhard for his generous invitation to present this work, in progress, at the UCLA Program in Experimental Critical Theory, and for his and his students’ responses to my presentation. I’d like to express, too, my thanks to Clara Boesak-Schroder of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and her colleagues, for inviting me to speak there. And I am indebted to the audience for a wonderfully timely question that helped me rethink my orientation to the climate of public opinion about classical studies in the present. The graduate students of the Classics Department of UCLA gave me the honor of asking me to speak to them, and I thank them and Alex Purves, Amy Richlin, and Bryant Kirkland for their hospitality and challenging contributions to my work on this book.
The kernel of ideas for this book came with the opportunity to contribute to “The Future of the Human,” special issue, Differences 20, nos. 2–3 (2009), edited by Warren Montag and my dear friend Nancy Armstrong; I am grateful to her for support, friendship, and exemplary resistance for decades.
I thank my colleagues Jacobo Myerston Santana and Sara Johnson for collegiality and generous contributions to my thinking, and my former colleague Tony Edwards, who knows more about comedy than I ever will, but who graciously conversed with me when I was beginning this project. Denise Demetriou has given me the gift of her friendship, for which I am most grateful. I learned much from Patrick Anderson. I thank my dear friend Lisa Lowe. Bruce Lincoln has my gratitude for his inspiring work, and for his support. I appreciated and continue to thank the challenging and engaged and committed members of my seminar “Swarm Theory” in the Literature Department at UCSD: Zachary Bushnell, Jing Chen, Tina Hyland, Sang Eun Lee, Grant Leuning, Jesus “Eddy” Miramontes, Matt Moore, Yanqin Tan, Maria Vlahaki, Stacie Vos, Xiaojiao Wang, and Jeanine Webb. I am grateful for pleasure and inspiration and support from former students Eunsong Kim and Reema Rajbanshi. My friends William Fitzgerald, Susan Smith and Sheldon Nodelman, Michael Meranze and Helen Deutsch, Edmond Chang and Esther Hsiao, Kate Harper and Harper Page Marshall, Melvyn Freilicher and Joe Keenan, are all part of a generative and kindly swarm. My gratitude extends to the late Tom Habinek and to Hector Reyes. And I thank Mary Kelly for dearest friendship and generosity. The anonymous reader of my manuscript proved extraordinarily lavish with commentary and suggestions, and I thank you, too, whoever you are. Susan Bielstein is a brilliant editor, and I am so appreciative of her talents and support for this project. Thank you, Susan.
I thank Suzanne Mathews for her guidance and empathy. I am forever grateful to the late Antonia Meltzoff. And to my beloved, John Daley.