Patrick O'Sullivan

Associate ProfessorPatrick O'Sullivan

(On sabbatical, Semester 2, 2023)
Rm 103B UC Arts City Location- 3 Hereford Street
Internal Phone: 94984

Qualifications & Memberships

Research Interests

Patrick O'Sullivan is a graduate of Melbourne and Cambridge Universities. He has won awards for his research, and has twice been voted Top Lecturer in the College of Arts at UC. His research interests primarily focus on Archaic and Classical Greek intellectual and cultural history. He has published widely on: Greek epic and lyric poetry, theatre, (incl. tragedy and satyr play), rhetoric and the First Sophistic, ancient visual aesthetics and literary criticism, athletics, atheism in antiquity, as well as on Greek and Roman art, including their reception in antiquity and beyond. In 2008 he was involved as translator and actor in a full production of Euripides' Cyclops, produced in Christchurch, which was linked to his (co-authored) book on Greek satyric drama, published in 2013. He has a contract with Routledge for a forthcoming book, provisionally entitled, The Rhetoric of Greek Art. Other ongoing projects include athletics and poetics in Pindar's victory odes, and Hercules in Roman epic.

Recent Publications

  • O'Sullivan P. and Collard C. (2013) Euripides: Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama. Oxford: Oxbow. 528pp.
  • O'Sullivan P. (2023) Changing Conceptions of Death in Ancient Greece (forthcoming). In Lindén E (Ed.), Reflections on the History of Ideas of Death Stockholm: Bokförlaget Stolpe.
  • O'Sullivan P. (2022) Epinician Virtue-Signaling: The Poetics of Aretê in Pindar’s Victory Odes. In Reid H; Serrati J (Ed.), Ageless Aretē: Essays from the 6th Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Hellenic Heritage of Sicily and Southern Italy: 67-90. Siracusa, Sicily: Parnassos Press.
  • O'Sullivan P. (2021) From Olympus to Aitna: Homer, Gorgias and the Power of Music in Pindar’s Pythian 1. In H. Reid and V. Lewis (Ed.), Pindar in Sicily: 119-142. Iowa: Parnassos Press.
  • O'Sullivan PD. (2021) Satyric Friendship in Euripides' Cyclops. In Antonopoulos A; Harrison, G.; Christopoulos M (Ed.), Reconstructing Satyr Drama: 375-394. Berlin: De Gruyter.