Associate ProfessorPatrick O'Sullivan

Patrick O'Sullivan is a graduate of Melbourne and Cambridge Universities, has won awards for his research, held Visiting Fellowships at Cambridge and Oxford Universities, and has twice been voted Top Lecturer in the College of Arts at UC. He teaches Latin and Greek language and literature at all levels as well as courses in translation on myth, art, philosophy, and ancient athletics. He has published widely on Archaic and Classical Greek culture from Homer to Aristotle with a focus on the pre-Platonic era, as well as on Latin literature, Greek and Roman art, and  their ancient and modern reception.

He was involved as translator and actor in a full production of Euripides' satyr-play Cyclops, produced in Christchurch; this was linked to his (co-authored) book Euripides Cyclops and Major Fragments of Greek Satyric Drama (Oxford, 2013), for which he won a Major Grant from the Marsden Fund through the Royal Society of NZ. The review of this book in the Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015) 195-6 concluded: ‘This volume, in short, will be game-changing … [it] marks a formidable work of scholarship in its own right, an accessible compilation of the genre’s remains and a spectacular addition to the teacher’s toolbox.’

Current projects include a contracted book with Routledge/Taylor & Francis, provisionally entitled, The Rhetoric of Greek Art. Other ongoing research includes Pindar and the Sophists, vision and emotion in Thucydides' History, Hercules in Roman epic, concepts of heroism in the poetry of Stesichorus and Vergil, and articles on Euripides, and the emotions in Greek tragedy.