Emily Greenwood


Emily Greenwood is a Professor of Classics and African-American Studies and Chair of the Department of Classics at Yale University. Her research focuses on Ancient Greek historiography, particularly Thucydides and Herodotus, and the development of History as a genre and a modern critical discipline. She also explores the appropriation and reinvention of Greco-Roman classical antiquity from the late nineteenth century to the present.

Early life and education

Greenwood has been described as "half-British, half-Ugandan, and she was born in the Cayman Islands".
Greenwood won a merit scholarship to a boarding school, Sevenoaks School. She gained her BA, MPhil, and PhD in Classics at the University of Cambridge. Her PhD thesis, completed in 2001 and supervised by Professor Paul Cartledge was entitled The Invention of the Critic. The Writer as Critic from Herodotus to Aristotle.

Career

Greenwood held a junior research fellowship at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, from 2000 until 2002. She was a lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews from 2002 to 2008, and joined the Classics Department at Yale in 2009, where she is Professor of Classics.
She received the Runciman Award in 2011 for her book Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the 20th Century.
Greenwood gave the Yale College Keynote Address on 29 August 2017 with the talk "The University we Build". In 2018 she gave the Clack lecture at the Classical Association of the Atlantic States annual meeting, "Speaking Bones: Classical Philology in Black Experimental Writing". At the same conference, a panel was organised in honour of her work. In 2019 she gave the inaugaral lecture of the University of Texas at Austin Distinguished Visiting Lecture Series, “Narrative and Social Justice", speaking on “Philology and Reparation: Resisting Anti-Human Errors in ‘Great’ Books”. She is a general editor of the Cambridge University Press series 'Classics after Antiquity'.

Monographs