Louis Markos

Louis Markos is Professor in English at Houston Baptist University, where he holds the Robert H. Ray Chair in Humanities.^[1] He earned his B.A. in English and History from Colgate University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in English from the University of Michigan. While at the University of Michigan, he specialized in British Romantic Poetry (his dissertation was on Wordsworth), Literary Theory, and the Classics. At Houston Baptist University (where he has taught since 1991), he offers courses in all three of these areas, as well as in Victorian Poetry and Prose, 17th-century Poetry and Prose, Mythology, Epic and Film. He also teaches classes on Ancient Greece and Rome for HBU’s Honors College along with courses on C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien and the Classics.

He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and has won Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award at the University of Michigan and was named the Opal Goolsby Teacher of the Year at the Houston Baptist University.^[2] In 1994, he was selected to attend an NEH Summer Institute on Virgil’s Aeneid. In addition to presenting several papers at scholarly conferences, Dr. Markos has become a popular speaker in Houston, Texas, where he has presented five lectures at the Museum of Printing History Lyceum (three on film, two on ancient Greece), a three-lecture series on film at the Houston Public Library, a class on film for Leisure Learning Unlimited, a class on the Odyssey for a retirement center and a lecture on Homer and the Oral Tradition for a seniors group. He has produced two lecture series with the Teaching Company ("The Life and Writings of C. S. Lewis"; "Plato to Postmodernism: Understanding the Essence of Literature and the Role of the Author") and has also published some five dozen articles and reviews in such journals as Christianity Today, Touchstone, Theology Today, Christian Research Journal, Mythlore, Christian Scholar’s Review, Saint Austin Review, American Arts Quarterly, and The City.

Personal Life

Dr. Markos lives in Houston, Texas, with his wife, Donna, his son, Alex, and his daughter, Stacey.

Scholarly works

• From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics
• Pressing Forward: Alfred, Lord Tennyson and the Victorian Age
• The Eye of the Beholder: How to See the World like a Romantic Poet
• Lewis Agonistes: How C. S. Lewis can Train us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World
• Apologetics for the 21st Century
• Restoring Beauty: The Good, the True and the Beautiful in the Writings of C. S. Lewis: A Student’s Guide
• On the Shoulders of Hobbits: The Road to Virtue in Tolkien and Lewis

Plays

Markos has had his modern adaptation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris performed off-Broadway^[3] in the Fall of 2011 and adaptations of Euripides’ Helen and Sophocles’ Oedipus were performed in 2012. He is also the co-author of a script on C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, "The Lion Awakes".

References