Egbert J. Bakker is Professor of Classics at Yale University. He is the author of Poetry in Speech: Orality and Homeric Discourse (1997) and Pointing at the Past: From Formula to Performance in Homeric Poetics (2005) and the co-editor with A. Kahane of Written Voices, Spoken Signs: Tradition, Performance, and Epic Text (1997). He has published widely on various aspects of the Greek language, in particular, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and speaking versus writing.