Irene J. F. de Jong (born 1957) is a classicist and professor of Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam.^[1] She is known for her pioneering work on narratology and Ancient Greek literature.^[1] She is a Fellow of the British Academy.^[2]

Career

Irene de Jong was born in Leiden in 1957.^[3] She studied at the University of Amsterdam from 1978 until 1982, and taught Classics at the Stedelijk Gymnasium in Utrecht in 1982–83.^[4] In 1984 she worked as a research fellow at the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. She wrote her dissertation, 'Narrators and focalizers: the presentation of the story in the Iliad',^[3] at the University of Amsterdam under a grant from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) from 1985 until 1987.^[1] She then continued to work at the University of Amsterdam, first as a postdoc and later as a research fellow.

Since 2002 she has held the chair of Ancient Greek at the University of Amsterdam.^[1]

De Jong has been member of the Academia Europaea since 2007.^[5] In 2015, De Jong was also selected as member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[6][7] In 2019 she was elected a foreign member of the Humanities and Social Sciences Division of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.^[8] She was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.^[9]

Selected publications

• Narrators and focalizers: the presentation of the story in the Iliad. Amsterdam 1987. Nachdruck Amsterdam 2004^[10]
• Narrative in drama: the art of the Euripidean messenger-speech. Leiden 1991 (Mnemosyne Supplement 116)^[11]
• with J. P. Sullivan: Modern critical theory and classical literature. Leiden 1994 (Mnemosyne Supplement 130)
• A Narratological Commentary on the Odyssey. Cambridge 2001^[12]
• Studies in ancient Greek narrative. Vol. 1: Narrators, narratees, and narratives in ancient Greek literature. Leiden 2004 (Mnemosyne Supplement 257)^[13]
• with Albert Rijksbaron: Sophocles and the Greek language: aspects of diction, syntax and pragmatics. Leiden 2006 (Mnemosyne Supplement 269)
• Studies in ancient Greek narrative. Vol. 2: Time in ancient Greek literature. Leiden 2007 (Mnemosyne Supplement 291)
• Studies in ancient Greek narrative. Vol. 3: Space in ancient Greek literature. Leiden 2012 (Mnemosyne Supplement 39)
• Homer Iliad Book XXII. Cambridge 2012
• I classici e la narratologia. Guida alla lettura degli autori greci e latini. Roma 2017.