Gregory Nagy
Attribution:
Photo by Genevieve Shiffrar
Gregory Nagy
Director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies
22 October 1942
Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1942, Professor Gregory Nagy has been the Director of the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC, since 2000. The center was founded in 1962 "to re-discover the humanism of the Hellenic Greeks". The center provides opportunities for students to learn about ancient Greek culture at two archaeological sites in Greece, Kenchreai, the port of the great ancient city of Corinth on the Aegean Sea and the Mycenaen site of Midea near the ancient city of Argos. The center also offers free discussion series that tackle such topics as Athenian law, the Homeric Odyssey and the cultivation of justice and Homer's poetic justic.
Professor Nagy also teaches half-time at the Harvard campus in Cambridge as the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature. He joined the faculty of Harvard in 1966 after receiving his degree there in Classical Philology. He has served in a number of distinguished positions including curator of the Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature and as a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University.
His special research interests are archaic Greek literature and oral poetics. He has explored the Greek myth in detail in his research and published extensively on the topic. His most recent publications about Greek mythology include:
“Lyric and Greek Myth.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (ed. R. D. Woodard;
Cambridge UP 2007) 19-51.
“Homer and Greek Myth.” The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (ed. R. D.
Woodard; Cambridge UP 2007) 52-82.
“Convergences and Divergences between God and Hero in the Mnesiepes Inscription of
Paros.” Archilochus and his Age II (ed. D. Katsonopoulou, I. Petropoulos, S.
Katsarou; Athens 2008) 259-265.
He presently teaches "The Concept of the Hero in Greek Civilization", a course in Harvard's core curriculum.
