Rate My Professor Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies and Department Chair in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she holds the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. She is also a member of the Comparative Literature Graduate Group. Wilson earned her B.A. in Literae Humaniores (Classical Literature and Philosophy) from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1994; her M.Phil. in English Renaissance Literature from Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in 1996; and her Ph.D. in Classics and Comparative Literature from Yale University in 2001. Her research interests encompass translation, myth, tragedy, epic, poetics and literary theory, literature and philosophy, the reception of classical literature especially in the Renaissance, gender, and genre. She has taught a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses, including Greek and Roman Mythology, Ancient Drama, Tragedy and the Tragic, Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, Virgil, Horace, Lucian, the Ancient Novel, Roman Comedy, Love and Loss, Socrates, Aeschylus and Herodotus, Paradise Lost, and Translation, as well as Sex and Gender.

Wilson's scholarly contributions include acclaimed verse translations of Homer's Iliad (Norton, 2023) and Odyssey (Norton, 2017), as well as four tragedies by Euripides in The Greek Plays (Modern Library, 2016), Six Tragedies of Seneca (Oxford World's Classics, 2010), The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford University Press, 2014), Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), and The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard University Press, 2007). She serves as classics editor for the third and subsequent editions of the Norton Anthology of World Literature and Norton Anthology of Western Literature, and has edited the Norton Critical Edition of the Odyssey and a Norton Critical Edition of Oedipus Tyrannos with her new verse translation. Her work has earned prestigious honors, including the MacArthur Fellowship (2019), Guggenheim Fellowship (2020), American Academy of Arts and Letters Literature Award (2025), Charles Bernheimer Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association (2003), and a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome (2006-2007). She received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law from the University of King’s College in 2025.