Craig Jendza’s primary research interests are Greek drama, Greek humor and horror, Greek mythology, magic, and religion, and Indo-European linguistics. He loves teaching courses on ancient magic and witches, Greek mythology, Greek drama, ancient epic tales, Greek rhetoric, Greek and Latin language, and (perhaps his favorite) horror film and Greek tragedy.
He is interested in understanding some fundamental questions related to Greek drama, such as how the genres of tragedy, comedy, and satyr drama relate to each other, or how comedy creates humor and tragedy creates horror. His book Paracomedy: Appropriations of Comedy in Greek Tragedy (Oxford University Press, 2020) argues that Greek tragedians were formatively influenced by the language, scenes, plots, and costumes of comedy, and that for decades the tragedian Euripides and the comedian Aristophanes were engaging in a theatrical rivalry with each other through their plays. More recently, he has been working on topics like comic bits and humorous incongruities, and his book on Aristophanes’s comedy Wasps is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic. His research has appeared in Classical Quarterly, American Journal of Philology, Archiv für Religionsgeschichte, and Journal of Indo-European Studies.
Before joining Denison in 2023, he was an associate professor of Classics at the University of Kansas, and earlier in his career, he taught middle school and high school Latin. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he loves watching comedy and horror in his spare time, and he is a Parks and Recreation superfan.