Stev Talarman received his BA and MA in Classical Philology from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2026. His thesis examined Cicero’s first literary dialogue, the De Oratore (On The Ideal Orator, 55-4 BCE), specifically Cicero’s construction of the figure of Socrates and the generative and highly intertextual functioning of what Stev terms Cicero’s “(Platonic) ambivalence.” Other work has touched on Plutarch’s (Greek) view of Roman social and political institutions in his Lives, as well as on the influence of Homeric Hymns in Nonnus of Panopolis’ Dionysiaca. Behind these seemingly disparate projects lies a central meta-interest in how texts, in their various forms, migrate, transform, and accrue new meaning and are made to authorize new claims in new contexts across languages and periods.
Alongside his native English, Stev speaks fluent German and engages with literature in Latin, Ancient Greek, German, Italian, French and Spanish, and has begun learning Sanskrit. Stev has lived in Berlin for 8 years. Prior to that, he earned his BM in Music Composition from the San Francisco Conservatory, near his hometown of Oakland, California.
Academic interests: Intellectual history, intertextuality; Roman reception and transformations of Greek thought and Greek reception of Roman culture in the first and second centuries CE; epic poetry in late Antiquity (syncretism, coexistence and interactions of pagan and Christian thought and art); Sanskrit and the cross-sections of comparative linguistics/Indo-European studies and comparative literature; Philosophy (specifically Platonism, Academic scepticism, and their reception by Cicero and in Rome more generally, e.g. Plutarch); (Post-)Classical Rhetoric (especially Sophists, Plato, Isocrates, Alcidamas etc.; rhetoric in the Empire); Roman translational practice (specifically Cicero’s techniques of translation, esp. Plato) and the role of authority in ancient translations; The Second Sophistic and broader transformations of classical models in late Antiquity (esp. in Christian contexts); The reception of Antiquity in the Renaissance (e.g. Lorenzo Valla, Pico della Mirandola) and the Modern period (Baroque opera and theatre; Enlightenment thought; Winckelmann, Goethe, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Arendt.
