As a scholar in Comparative Literature I pursue interdisciplinary approaches to literary studies, and I often collaborate with colleagues and students on research projects.
I am a founding member of Contexts for Classics (CfC), an interdepartmental faculty consortium founded in 2000 at the University of Michigan, to explore and compare classical traditions in diverse cultural, critical, and creative contexts. We launched a Graduate Certificate in Classical Reception Studies that is open to masters and doctoral students across all departments and programs at our university.
For more than three decades it has been my honor to work at the University of Michigan as a public institution, where I am actively involved in campus-wide initiatives related to critical translation studies, including curricular development and community outreach. I collaborated with a team of U-M colleagues to lead a Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series on Translation in the Multilingual Midwest (2021-23), and an ongoing public humanities project on diverse histories of multilingualism and migration in Michigan: translatingmichigan.org
Over the years I have written together with Virginia Jackson (UC Irvine) on topics related to lyric theory and comparative poetics. Together with Americanists and Victorianists from various institutions, we are founding members of the Nineteenth Century Historical Poetics Group.
My publications (books, articles, translations) are listed below.
Follow Yopie Prins on Academia.edu
Books
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS (2017)
“Ladies’ Greek is the resounding answer to Woolf’s ‘On Not Knowing Greek.’ What was unleashed when women as well as men, on both sides of the Atlantic, came to intimately know their beloved Greek tragedies? Prins recreates the burgeoning culture of translation and re-enactment at women’s colleges, reviving enthusiasms of the forgotten and famous, from A. Mary F. Robinson to Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This is a definitive literary history that will influence future scholars, but any reader may binge on it like a beautiful BBC drama.”
-Alison Booth, University of Virginia
AWARDS
Robert Lowry Patten Prize in Nineteenth-Century Literature, awarded by SEL: Studies in English Literature
NAVSA Best Book Prize, awarded by North American Victorian Studies Association
Shortlist for the 2017 London Hellenic Prize
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS (1999)
“Victorian Sappho is one of the most scholarly and imaginative books on Victorian poetry to emerge in the past decade. It places Sappho within the context of Victorian poetics with an assurance arising from a fine grasp of ancient Greek texts, a subtle historical understanding, and above all a capacity to read the formal patterns of Victorian verse and metrics with a virtuosic combination of aesthetic insight and ideological understanding. An altogether innovative book.”
- Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck College, University of London
AWARDS
Sonya Rudikoff Prize for First Book in Victorian Studies, awarded by NEVSA: Northeast Victorian Studies Association
Honorable Mention for First Book Prize, awarded by MLA: Modern Language Association
JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS (2014)
“Through an astute selection of essays and a series of brilliant commentaries on them, Jackson and Prins show that, although the way we conceive lyric is a recent invention that embodies a singularly modern and Western set of cultural ideas and values, we uphold lyric as the universal model of what poetry is and should be. Reading The Lyric Theory Reader is an exhilarating experience. In collecting what are arguably the most important modern statements about lyric, it opens up the diverse acuity of commentary on this most enduringly canonical of literary categories, and in that process encourages our most searching reflections on the historical existence of literary forms.”
-Michael McKeon, Rutgers University
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CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS (1997)
“Dwelling in Possibility is a splendid collaboration between poets and critics. Prins and Shreiber have interwoven sophisticated feminist critical essays with poetic meditations on genre and gender; the dialogues they set up are lyrically elegant as well as intellectual exhilarating. This collection not only sets a new standard for feminist theorizing about poetic genres, it performs the pleasures of feminist reading in all their diversity.”
-Mary Loeffelholz, Northeastern University
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THE FEMINIST PRESS (1998)
This bilingual anthology of over 100 poems by 45 women poets is a long-awaited new volume in the ground-breaking Defiant Muse series. The product of nearly ten years of research and translation, it includes poems by both well-known and rediscovered Dutch and Flemish poets, the majority of them available in English for the first time. The volume presents poems in the original language, with exquisite English translations on opposite pages.
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Articles
pdfs available via academia.edu
“The Music of Homer: Anne Carson’s TROYJAM,” in Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices, ed. Emily Hauser and Helena Taylor (Bloomsbury Press, 2025).
“An Essay on An Essay on Irony,” in Anne Carson/Antiquity, ed. Laura Jansen (Bloomsbury Press, 2021).
“Sapphic Stanzas: How can we read the rhythm?” in Critical Rhythm: The Poetics of a Literary Life Form, ed. Benjamin Glaser and Jonathan Culler (Fordham University Press, 2019).
“ ‘What is Historical Poetics?’ “Modern Language Quarterly 77.1 (Winter 2016): 13-40.
“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: Oxford University Press, 2015).
“Translating Tragedy: Robert Browning’s Greek Decade.” In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature, ed. Norman Vance and Jennifer Wallace (Oxford University Press, 2014).
“Metrical Discipline: Algernon Swinburne on ‘The Flogging Block,’” in Algernon Charles Swinburne: Unofficial Laureate, ed. Catherine Maxwell and Stefano Evangelista (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013): 95-124.
“Poetess” entry in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (Fourth Edition), ed. Roland Greene et al (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012): 1051-54.
“‘Break, Break, Break’ into Song,” in Meter Matters: Verse Cultures of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jason Hall (Columbus: Ohio University Press, 2011): 105-134. The article (with links to musical excerpts) can also be accessed via Songs of the Victorians, developed by Joanna Swafford.
“Classical Reception and the Political” (with Miriam Leonard) in Cultural Critique 74 (Winter 2010): 1-13.
“The Sexual Politics of Translating Prometheus Bound,” in Cultural Critique 74 (Winter 2010): 164-80.
“Classics for Victorians: Response,” in Victorian Studies 52.1 (Autumn 2009): 52-62.
“Historical Poetics, Dysprosody, and The Science of English Verse,” in PMLA 123.1 (January 2008): 229-34.
“Robert Browning, Transported by Meter,” in The Traffic in Poems: Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Transatlantic Exchange, ed. Meredith McGill (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007): 205-30.
“Lady’s Greek (with the accents): A metrical translation of Euripides by A. Mary F. Robinson.” Victorian Literature and Culture 34.2 (2006): 591-618.
“OTOTOTOI: Virginia Woolf and the Naked Cry of Cassandra.” Agamemnon in Performance, ed. Edith Hall, Fiona Macintosh, Pantelis Michelakis, Oliver Taplin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): 163-85.
“Patmore’s Law, Meynell’s Rhythm,” in The Fin-de-Siecle Poem, ed. Joseph Bristow (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2005): 261-84.
“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): 229-56.
“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): 230-58.
“Voice Inverse,” in Victorian Poetry 42.1 (spring 2004): 43-59.
“Victorian Meters,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow (Cambridge University Press, 2000): 89-113.
“Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters.” In Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999): 43-81. Awarded Prize for Best Essay in 1999 by the Women’s Classical Caucus of the American Philological Association.
“Lyrical Studies” (with Virginia Jackson) in Victorian Literature and Culture 27:2 (Fall 1999): 521-30.
“Personifying the Poetess: Caroline Norton, ‘The Picture of Sappho,’” in Gender and Genre: Women’s Poetry 1830-1900, ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain (London: Macmillan, 1998): 50-67.
“Sappho’s Afterlife in Translation,” in Re-Reading Sappho: Reception and Transmission, ed. Ellen Greene (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): 36-67.
“Sappho Doubled: Michael Fieldm” in The Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995), 165-186. Reprinted in Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry, ed. Prins and Shreiber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997): 85-108.
“A Metaphorical Field: Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper,” in Victorian Poetry 33.1(Spring 1995): 129-148.
“Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning and the Différance of Translation,” in Victorian Poetry 29.4 (Winter 1991): 435-451.
“The Power of the Speech Act: Aeschylus’ Furies and their Binding Song,” in Arethusa 24.2 (Fall 1991): 177-195.
“Violence Bridling Speech: Browning’s Translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon” in Victorian Poetry 27.3-4 (Browning Centennial Issue, Autumn-Winter 1989): 151-170.
Translations
Mother Number Zero. Book for young readers by Marjolein Hof, translated from Dutch by Johanna H. Prins and Johanna W. Prins (Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2011). Commended for The Vondel Prize for Translation from the Dutch, awarded by Society of Authors, London 2014.
Against the Odds. Book for young readers by Marjolein Hof, translated from Dutch by Johanna H. Prins and Johanna W. Prins (Toronto: Groundwood Books, 2009).
Translator of Dutch poetry in The Defiant Muse: Dutch and Flemish Feminist Poems From the Middle Ages to the Present. A bilingual anthology edited and introduced by Maaike Meijer, with co-editors Erica Eijsker, Ankie Peijpers, and Yopie Prins (New York: The Feminist Press, 1997).
The Acorn Eaters. Novel for young readers by Els Pelgrom, translated from Dutch by Johanna H. Prins and Johanna W. Prins (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1997).
The Princess in the Kitchen Garden. Children’s book by Annemie and Margriet Heijmans, translated from Dutch by Johanna H. Prins and Johanna W. Prins (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992). American Library Association Notable Book; 1993 Batchelder Award for Translation.
A Small Favor. Memoir by Anja Meulenbelt, translated from Dutch by Johanna H. Prins and Johanna W. Prins (San Francisco: The Crossing Press, 1989).
Translations from Dutch by Johanna H. and Johanna W. Prins in Jewish Mothers Tell Their Stories (New York: Haworth Press, 2000).
Selected translations of Dutch poetry in The Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2000), Callaloo (Fall 1998), The Journal of Literary Translation: Dutch Issue (Fall 1990), Dutch Interior: Postwar Poetry of the Netherlands and Flanders (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984).
Translations of Sappho, American Poetry Review (March-April 1984).