Paul Friedrich is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, of Linguistics, and in the Committee on Social Thought, and Associate in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. He has done fieldwork in southwestern Mexico, South India, and among Russians. Other research includes the Aphrodite myth in Ancient Greece, and Proto-Indo-European, and American poetry. His current work is divided between anthropology and literary studies (e.g., Dostoevsky, Thoreau) and theoretical problems in ethnography, poetics, and world poetry.