Yopie Prins

Teaching Interests: Nineteenth-century poetry and prosody; comparative poetics and lyric theory; Classical reception studies; Critical translation studies; Music and literature

Languages: Dutch (native), German, French, Ancient Greek, Latin

Yopie Prins received the Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Princeton University in 1991, and has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1994. She is the author of Victorian Sappho (1999) and Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (2017) and co-editor of The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology (2014), Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (1997), and a special issue of Cultural Critique on “Classical Reception and the Political” (2010). Additional publications include articles on Victorian poetry and prosody, historical poetics, translation studies, and Classical Greek literature and its reception; she has also translated Dutch contemporary literature. Currently she is writing a book on meter and music in Victorian poetry, entitled Voice Inverse.   

She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (2003-2004) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (1999-2000, 1993-1994), and she studied abroad as a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Amsterdam (1983-84) and as a Marshall Scholar at Cambridge University (1981-83). She has served as President of the American Comparative Literature Association, and on advisory boards for the English Institute, the MLA Victorian Division and the MLA Discussion Group on Classical Studies and Modern Literature, the Committee on Classical Tradition and Reception for the American Philological Association, and for the journals Victorian Literature and Culture, Translation Studies and Classical Reception Studies. She is a member of the Michigan Society of Fellows and a founding member of “Contexts for Classics” at the University of Michigan. 

Her teaching in Comparative Literature includes undergraduate courses on "Great Performances," “Translating World Literatures,” “Women Writers and Classical Myth,”  “Sappho and the Lyric Tradition,” and graduate seminars on “Introduction to Comparative Literature,” "Nineteenth Century Poetry and (in, as, of) Translation," “Comparative Poetics and Lyric Theory,” “The Tropes of Translation,” “Hearing Voices: Music and Lyric,” “Classical Translations, Translating Classics," and "Comparing Approaches to Classical Reception Studies."   

Publications:

Books

• Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton University Press, 2017). Awarded 2018 Best Book Prize by the North American Victorian Studies Association and 2018 Robert Lowry Patten Award for Best Book in Nineteenth-Century British Studies by SEL Studies in English Literature. Shortlisted for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize. 
• The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).  
• Victorian Sappho (Princeton University Press, 1999). Awarded Sonia Rudikoff Prize in Victorian Studies and Honorable Mention for MLA First Book Prize.  
• Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (Cornell University Press, 1997).

Selected essays

• "An Essay on An Essay on Irony," in Anne Carson / Antiquity, ed. Laura Jansen (Bloomsbury, Fall 2021).
• "Sapphic Stanzas: How can we read the rhythm?" In Critical Rhythm:The Poetics of a Literary Life Form, ed. Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler (Fordham University Press, 2019). 
• “ 'What is Historical Poetics?',” in Modern Language Quarterly 77.1 (Winter 2016).
• "This Bird That Never Settles: A Virtual Conversation with Anne Carson about Greek Tragedy," in The Oxford Handbook of Greek Drama in the Americas, ed. Kathryn Bosher, Fiona Macintosh, Justine McConnell, Patrick Rankine (Oxford University Press, 2015). 
• “’Break Break Break’ into Song,” in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall (Ohio University Press, 2011).
• “Classics for Victorians.”  Victorian Studies 52.2 (Winter 2010).
•  “Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and the Science of English Verse.”  In “New Lyric Studies,” PMLA 123.1 (January 2008).
• “Robert Browning, Transported by Meter.”  In The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith McGill (Rutgers University Press, 2007).
• “Metrical Translation: Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania.” In Nation, Language and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Bermann and Michael Wood (Princeton University Press, 2005).
• “Sappho Recomposed: A Song Cycle by Granville and Helen Bantock.”  In The Figure of Music in Nineteenth-Century British Poetry, ed. Phyllis Weliver (Ashgate Press, 2005).
• “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters.”  In Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago University Press, 1999).  Awarded Prize for Best Essay in 1999 by the Women’s Classical Caucus of the American Philological Association.  
• “Sappho’s Afterlife in Translation.”  In Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. Ellen Greene (University of California Press, 1997).
• "The Power of the Speech Act: Aeschulus' Furies and Their Binding Song." Arethusa 24.2 (Fall 1991). 
• “Violence Bridling Speech: Browning’s Translation of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon.”  Victorian Poetry 27.3-4 (1989).
  

Affiliations

• Comparative Literature
  English Language and Literature

Fields of Study

• Nineteenth-century poetry and prosody
• Comparative poetics and lyric theory
• Classical reception studies
• Critical translation studies
• Music and literature