Simon Goldhill

Simon David Goldhill, FBA (born 17 March 1957) is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge.

Goldhill was educated at University College School in Hampstead, London, and King's College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first-class honours degree in 1978 and a PhD in 1982.

While at Cambridge he was awarded the university's prestigious Chancellor's Medal for poetry.

Goldhill's research interests include Greek Tragedy, Greek Culture, Literary Theory, Later Greek Literature, and Reception.

In 2009, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2010, he was appointed as the John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, a research position held concurrently with his chair in Greek.

Jerusalem, City of Longing won the Independent Publishers Gold medal for History in 2010.

He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Mary Jacobus in October 2011.

He is best known for his work on Greek tragedy.

His latest books include Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity: Art, Opera, Fiction and the Proclamation of Modernity (2011), based on his Martin Lectures at Oberlin College in 2010, and Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy (2012), based on his Onassis Lectures, delivered across America in 2011.

His books have won international prizes in three different subject areas.

Victorian Culture and Classical Antiquity won the 2012 Robert Lowry Patten Award for "the best recent study in nineteenth-century British literary studies or the best recent study in British literary studies of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century" published between 2010 and 2012.

Sophocles and the Language of Tragedy won the 2013 Runciman Award for the best book on a Greek topic, ancient or modern.

In 2016, he became a fellow of the British Academy.

He is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and is President of the European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS).

Goldhill is a well-known lecturer and broadcaster and has appeared on television and radio in England, Australia, the United States and Canada.

His books have been translated into ten languages, and he has been profiled by newspapers in Brazil, Australia and the Netherlands.

Goldhill was the Principal Investigator for a project on The Bible and Antiquity in 19th-Century Culture, funded by the European Research Council and based at CRASSH, in collaboration with the Cambridge Classics Faculty.

The team consisted of six postdoctoral fellows and the following directors of the project: