PhD, MPhil, MA, BA
Professor Emily Greenwood
Professor Emily Greenwood studied Classics at Downing from 1993-96 and is widely recognised as an exceptional Classicist who has reshaped the field in a variety of ways. Success began at a comparatively young age, with a sequence of tenured Professorships at three leading Ivy League Universities: a Professorship in Classics, with a secondary appointment in African American Studies, at Yale, where she was promoted to a named chair in 2020, followed by a Laurance S. Rockefeller Professorship in Classics and the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, and since 2022 she has been a Professor in the Departments of Classics and Comparative Literature at Harvard. She has made an outstanding contribution to the field of Classics, moving beyond what she terms ‘the piling up of erudition’ and instead approaching the study of Classics as a way of living and thinking with the archives of use—how different groups have used Greek and Roman Classics—that requires the constant exercise of our moral imagination.
Her research spans ancient Greek literature, classical reception studies, translation studies, intellectual history, postcolonial studies, and Black Studies. Books include Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010), which was joint winner of the 2011 Runciman Award, and Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006). In 2022 she edited a two-volume special issue of the American Journal of Philology on “Diversifying the Classical Tradition”. Her current book projects include Black Classicisms and the Expansion of the Western Classical Tradition, which explores the critical difference that local and transnational black traditions of interpreting Greek and Roman classics make to existing conceptions of the Western classical tradition. In 2022 she gave the Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World at the University of Pennsylvania on The Recovery of Loss: Ancient Greece and American Erasures, which she is adapting for publication. She has been invited to give the prestigious Sather Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in 2026, and the prestigious Martin Classical Lectures at Oberlin College in the same year.