Fitxa persona

Mikel Labiano completed his PhD in Classical Philology from the Universidad de Salamanca in 1999 with a dissertation on interjections in Aristophanic comedy, supervised by Antonio López Eire. After holding academic positions at the University of La Rioja and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, he secured a permanent position as Associate Professor of Ancient Greek at the Universitat de València in 2003. Since 2025, he has been a Full Professor at the same university.

His book, Estudio de las interjecciones en las comedias de Aristófanes (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 2000), is widely cited in the major Aristophanic commentaries by Douglas S. Olson: Acharnians (Oxford, 2002), Thesmophoriazusae (Oxford, 2004), and Wasps(Oxford, 2015); as well as in Olson's Clouds (Michigan 2021), Anderson-Dix's Knights (Michigan 2020), and Olson-Biles' Knights(Cambridge 2025). It served as an immediate precursor to Michèle Biraud’s Les interjections du théâtre grec antique (Louvain-La-Neuve, Peeters, 2010) and Lars Nordgren’s Greek Interjections (Berlin, De Gruyter, 2015), as acknowledged by the authors themselves. This study of Ancient Greek interjections is part of a broader line of research concerning conversational Attic Greek, insofar as it can be accessed through textual sources, primarily dramatic texts.

Alongside this line of research on Aristophanic comedy—particularly concerning all aspects of conversational Ancient Greek—he has also studied Euripidean tragedy. He has published several translations of Euripides with Cátedra and Alianza Editorial (Eurípides. Tragedias II. Madrid: Cátedra, 1999; Eurípides. Tragedias III. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000; Eurípides. El Cíclope. Ión. Reso. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2010), in addition to several linguistic and philological studies.

His research has also extended to linguistic aspects of the Hippocratic Corpus, focusing on the history of the language, with the aim of contributing to the extensive scholarship on the complex formation of this rich and diverse corpus. In recent years, these studies have led him to participate in two research projects on forgeries, literary pseudoepigrapha, and issues of authorship, with a particular focus on the body of pseudoepigraphic letters and writings within the Hippocratic Collection.

He is currently a member of GRATUV (Grup de Recerca i Acció Teatral de la Universitat de València: https://www.uv.es/gratuv/). Within this group, he plans to continue studying the modes of linguistic expression of political violence in ancient Greek comedy, specifically in Aristophanes, using the analytical frameworks of Conversation Analysis and verbal (im)politeness. These frameworks have been successfully applied to modern Indo-European languages and, more recently, to Ancient Greek. This line of research is situated within a broader, long-range goal: to modernize the methodological framework for studying the conversational language of ancient Greek theatre.