Plato wrote four dialogues dramatizing the last days and death of Socrates: Euthyphro, The Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. “Dyng Angry” will focus on Socrates’s behavior and performance —and weirdness—in Phaedo.

Harry Berger Jr. came to Cowell College and UCSC from Yale in 1965 when our campus opened. He was the first appointment in English Literature, and he was largely responsible for hiring the original cadre of English literature faculty. Since that time he’s taught courses ranging from classics to modern poetry for Cowell College, the Literature Department, and History of Consciousness. He retired in 1994 but has taught a lot since then and in general keeps himself too busy to stay out of trouble.

In 2003 he received a Lifetime Award from the International Spenser Society.The proceedings of a 2006 conference in his honor were published with revisions and additions in a volume of essays: A Touch More Rare: Harry Berger, Jr., and the Arts of Interpretation, ed. David Miller and Nina Levine (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006, and in 2010 he received the Constantine Panunzio Distinguished Emeriti Award from the University of California.

Berger has published 13 books and over 100 essays on a wide variety of topics in classics, art history, Renaissance culture, and modern poetry. Many of these deal with Plato, Shakespeare, Spenser, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and theories of literature and art. Three new books are forthcoming from Fordham University Press:

Simonides in Couch City: Studies in Plato’s Republic and Protagoras, 2014.
Harrying: Skills of Offense in Shakespeare’s Henriad, 2014.
The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt. 2014.