Professor Turkeltaub is an Associate Professor and the current chair of the Classics Department. He teaches all levels of Greek and Latin language, literature, and culture classes. His courses explore concepts of humor, justice, myth, and religion, how literature discusses those subjects, and how those discussions are integrated into larger cultural and political frameworks.
Professor Turkeltaub’s research focuses on Greek epic poetry, tragedy, and comedy. More specifically, he studies how Greek epics, tragedies, and comedies generated meanings and induced effects through their original modes of performance that we can easily miss when we experience them simply as written texts removed from their original cultural contexts. He is particularly interested in how these art forms encouraged their audiences to rethink normalized modes of interpreting poetry and commemorating their pasts in ways that facilitated the propagandistic use of poetry, art, and rhetoric. He has published on the Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymns, and Euripides’ Hecuba. His current projects include recovering the ways Homeric epics, especially Homer’s Odyssey, use humor as a vehicle for discussing the value of traditional epic poetry and the concepts of epic heroism its language encodes, as well as how Euripides created spaces and sights for his audiences that challenged them to reexamine the effects on civic ideology of contemporary developments in artistic and oratorical commemorations of the dead.
Daniel Turkeltaub earned his A.B. in Classics with a certificate in Medieval Studies from Princeton University and his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He arrived at Santa Clara University in 2010 after holding positions at Stanford University (2002-2005), Washington and Lee University (2005-2006), University of Notre Dame (2006-2007), and Millsaps College (2007-2010).