David Konstan is Professor of Classics at New York University and Professor Emeritus at Brown University. He is a member of CHE's Advisory board. His research focuses on ancient Greek and Latin literature, especially comedy and the novel, and classical philosophy. In recent years, he has investigated the emotions and value concepts of classical Greece and Rome, and has written books on friendship, pity, the emotions of the ancient Greeks, forgiveness, and, most recently, on beauty. He has also written on ancient physics and atomic theory and on literary theory, and has completed a verse translation of the two Senecan tragedies about Hercules.
Prof. Konstan's BA was in mathematics; in senior year of college, he began ancient Greek and Latin, and went on to obtain a doctorate in classics. He taught at Wesleyan University from 1967 to 1987, and at Brown University from 1987 to 2010, when he joined the faculty at NYU.
Prof. Konstan has held visiting appointments in New Zealand, Scotland, Brazil, Argentina, South Africa, Australia, and Egypt, among other places. He serves on the Editorial Boards of numerous journals around the world, including Emotions: History, Culture, Society. He has been President of the American Philological Association, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He has been awarded NEH, ACLS, and Guggenheim fellowships, among others. He will be a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study from September through December 2016, and a fellow at the Institut d’Études Avancées de Paris, from February through June 2017. His project is a study of gratitude, loyalty and altruism.
Contact
dk87@nyu.edu
NYU profile
