Simon Goldhill

  • University of Cambridge
  • Faculty of Classics
  • Professor of Greek Literature and Culture

Simon Goldhill is Professor of Greek at Cambridge where he is also the Director of CRASSH (The Cambridge Centre for Research in Arts, Social, Sciences and Humanities), which is committed to interdisciplinary collaborative work), and the John Harvard Professor. He is also a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Simon Goldhill has worked extensively on Greek literature, bringing together literary analysis, social analysis and cultural forms: he is best known for his work on Greek tragedy, and for his contributions to classics and modern theoretical approaches. He also works on Victorian studies and currently runs an eleven-person five-year research project on “The Bible and Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Culture,” funded by the European Research Council. His book “Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy” (Princeton, 2012) won the Runciman Prize for Greek studies, ancient and modern in 2013; his book “Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity” (Oxford, 2011) won the 2013 Robert Lowry Patten prize at the MLA from Studies in English Literature for the best book in Victorian literary studies for 2010-12; his book “Jerusalem, City of Longing” (Harvard, 2008) won the Gold Medal (History) from the Independent Publishers Association in 2009. His books have been translated into twelve languages. His next book is called “The Buried Life of Things” and will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2014: it is an interdisicplinary, intermedial study of how material culture is used and abused to tell history in nineteenth-century culture.