Jill Frank
· President White Professor of History and Political Science and the Robert J. Katz Chair of the Department of GovernmentCornell University · Classics
Active 1987–2024
About
Jill Frank is the President White Professor of History and Political Science and holds the Robert J. Katz Chair of the Department of Government at Cornell University. Her research focuses on the historians, poets, and philosophers of Ancient Greece, exploring how resources from these past thinkers can inform contemporary democratic theory and practice. Her work has included completed projects on topics such as law, judgment, persuasion, justice, property, and nature. Currently, she is writing on the question of constitution, the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and the practice of power in the works of Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Thucydides. Her scholarly contributions aim to connect ancient thought with modern political and philosophical issues, emphasizing the relevance of classical ideas to current democratic discourse.
Research topics
- Political Science
- Sociology
- Social Science
- Law
- Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Mechanical engineering
- Environmental ethics
- Linguistics
- Aesthetics
- Literature
- Art
- Religious studies
- Media studies
- Engineering
Selected publications
Weaving Politics in Plato's Statesman1
Routledge eBooks · 2024
1st authorCorresponding- Political Science
- Political Science
- Engineering
The weaving paradigm in Plato’s Statesman is often understood as underwriting a kingly (if not authoritarian) statesman and a statecraft of command and obedience. Taking the Eleatic xēnos’ paradigm of weaving as a provocation to interrogate the craft of weaving as it was actually practiced in ancient Greece, we draw on literary and archaeological evidence showing, contra the xenos’ representation, that weaving separates without cutting, combines without subordinating, and intertwines not by producing unanimity but by accommodating difference in unity. We argue that the dialogue as a whole endorses the statecraft for which actual weaving is a paradigm, one that rules not via kingly command and obedience, or by mastery and subordination, but through conjoint and cooperative practices of ordering that unfold, as does fabric, through the fabrication process itself.
On Persuasion in Plato’s <i>Republic</i>
Oxford University Press eBooks · 2023-05-22
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract Reading the Republic’s critique of rhetoric not as a blanket condemnation of persuasion but as rejecting modes of speech that fail to preserve the distinction between persuasion and force, this chapter establishes the dialog’s interest in discursive practices in which speakers and listeners willingly, actively, and jointly participate in their own persuasion. Treating such practices as exemplifications in life of the grammatical middle voice of Attic Greek and exploring the operations of this kind of persuasion in analogical argumentation, the chapter brings to light the critical role of middle-voice persuasion in the Republic’s understandings of both justice and philosophy.
Plato and the mythic tradition in political thought
Contemporary Political Theory · 2022-03-31
articleOpen accessThe role of the word 'myth' in contemporary political discourse appears to be fairly straightforward: to call something a 'myth' (e.g., 'the Lost Cause,' 'the steal,' 'the stab in the back,' 'the fallen cherry tree,' 'racial superiority,' 'computer chips in vaccines,' 'There was so much love at that [January 6th] rally') is usually to call it a
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-05-11
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingFordham University Press eBooks · 2021 · 3 citations
Senior authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Literature
- Philosophy
In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s <italic>Protagoras</italic>. <italic>Couch City</italic> ties this review with a literary interpretation of the poem’s involvement in the dialogue, how the dialogue itself may be read literarily, and, most importantly, how these readings work together rather than as discrete, incidental literary interventions in Socrates studies. It uses concepts like the performatives of speech-act theory to demonstrate how the structure of the dialogue sanctions the poem’s transgressive playfulness as much as how Socrates’s performance of the poem informs that structure as well as its execution. As much as <italic>Couch City</italic> examines classical rhetoric and philosophy, it reverberates just as much into contemporary literary studies. The book marries careful structural reading of the poem and dialogue with broader conceptual investigation that may be applied to or re-read in the poem or its reading, producing an argument that rejects the notion that Socrates fails Plato’s philosophical project, but rather complicates it in literary fashion by <italic>performing</italic> sophistry in order to <italic>defeat</italic> sophistry.
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-05-11
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingJill Frank introduces Berger’s argument by addressing the ethicalities of Plato’s proposed <italic>Klinopolis</italic>—his “Couch City”—whether it promises to be the good city, the bad city, or perhaps something else, while highlighting Protagoras’s insistence on teaching a fixed program for making good decisions. Socrates names Protagoras’s stance “the political art.” Performing “political art” virtuously sits in the heart of Berger’s couch city. Although the <italic>Protagoras</italic> has traditionally been read as a resounding victory for Socrates over Protagoras’s claims of virtue, Berger, as Frank notes, sees the outcome differently. For Berger, Socrates, in “beating Protagoras at his own game,” becomes Protagoras’s double. This doubling of speech, however, fails to produce an ethical resolution from either Protagoras or Socrates; instead, their speeches become “occasions for weaponizing virtue” and evading responsibility for their words. According to Berger, both Socrates and Protagoras fail. But as Frank suggests, their failures prompt “readers of the dialogue to do otherwise”—to “open a different ethics, rhetoric, and politics of responsibility.”
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2021-05-04
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingPerspectives on Politics · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
Rediscovering Political Friendship: Aristotle’s Theory and Modern Identity, Community, and Equality. By Paul W. Ludwig. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 362p. $105.00 cloth. - Volume 18 Issue 4
Tragedy, education, democracy: J. Peter Euben’s Political Theory
Contemporary Political Theory · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Social Science
- Political Science
Chapter 16. Situating Harry’s Plato
Fordham University Press eBooks · 2020-11-20
book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
Frequent coauthors
- 3 shared
Mary Fainsod Katzenstein
University of Victoria
- 2 shared
S. Sara Monoson
- 2 shared
Roxanne L. Euben
University of Oxford
- 1 shared
Natalie C. Rogol
- 1 shared
Anand Edward Sokhey
- 1 shared
Tae-Yeoun Keum
- 1 shared
David Lay Williams
DePaul University
- 1 shared
K.W. Mudge
Cornell University
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