Bill Mullen
Bill Mullen | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | November 4, 1946 |
| Died | November 2, 2017 (aged 70) |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Harvard College; University of Texas at Austin |
| Known for | Electric Universe |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Classics, comparative literature, catastrophism |
| Institutions | Bard College |
William C. "Bill" Mullen (November 4, 1946 – November 2, 2017) was an American classicist, poet, and independent scholar who taught for more than three decades at Bard College and was a well-known figure in the Electric Universe and catastrophist community. Alongside his academic work on Greek and Latin poetry, he wrote and lectured on the ideas of Immanuel Velikovsky and on the possible influence of celestial events on ancient myth and chronology.
Biography
Mullen received his BA in Classics from Harvard College in 1968, graduating magna cum laude and as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and earned his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin in 1972 with a dissertation on the Greek poet Pindar. Before settling into a permanent post, he held teaching or postdoctoral positions at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Boston University, Harvard's Center for Hellenic Studies, and St. John's College.
He joined Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, as associate professor of classics in 1985, became full professor in 1989, and taught there until his death in 2017, building the college's Classics program largely from scratch over his 32 years on the faculty. He also served as a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the United States Air Force Academy in 2013–14. Mullen died suddenly on November 2, 2017, two days before his 71st birthday.
Work
As a classicist, Mullen was known for his book Choreia: Pindar and Dance (Princeton University Press, 1982), a study reconstructing the dance and performance of Pindar's victory odes. He was an active advocate of the oral recitation of ancient verse and participated in The Readers of Homer, an organization sponsoring audience-participation readings of the Homeric epics. His wide-ranging interests included Chinese poetry, a poetry practice of his own—his poem "Enchanted Rock" appeared in The Best American Poetry 1998—and the "Baltic Homer" hypothesis, which he investigated by sailing the Baltic Sea with students.
Outside mainstream classics, Mullen engaged extensively with the work of Immanuel Velikovsky and with catastrophist and Electric Universe ideas. He examined why Velikovsky's cosmic scenarios in Worlds in Collision were, in his view, inseparable from the revised chronology of Ages in Chaos, and he discussed competing models of ancient chronology, including the revisions proposed by Gunnar Heinsohn and Heribert Illig. He also argued that Anthony Peratt's comparison of ancient petroglyphs to laboratory plasma forms represented a use of "visual intuition" as a form of proof, a concept he related to Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Mullen served as master of ceremonies at the Electric Universe conferences EU2012 in Las Vegas and EU2017, and presented talks such as "Hieroglyphics and the Ancient Sky" at EU2014.