Emily Greenwood joins Classics faculty

The Classics department welcomes our newest faculty member, Emily Greenwood, who will join Princeton as a Professor in both Classics and the University Center for Human Values. Her work spans Greek literature and language, reception studies, intellectual history, postcolonial studies and Black studies. Her vast expertise on the Classical world and its continuing influences today make her an important addition to the department. 

Professor Greenwood comes to Princeton from Yale University where she was the John M. Musser Professor of Classics and held a courtesy secondary appointment in African American Studies. She is the author of two books, “Thucydides and the Shaping of History” (Duckworth, 2006), and “Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century” (Oxford University Press, 2010), which was the joint winner of the 2011 Runciman Prize.

Professor Greenwood works on subjects spanning ancient Greek historiography, prose literature from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE and modern classical reception, especially the use of the Classics in Africa, Britain, the Caribbean and Greece. She is currently writing a book with the working title Black Classicisms and the Expansion of the Western Classical Tradition and preparing The Penn Public Lectures on Classical Antiquity and the Contemporary World, for Fall 2022, on the subject “Classics in Real Time: Civics Lessons from Ancient Greece”. In addition to these subjects, Professor Greenwood has also worked on the theory and practice of translating the Classics.