Michael Stephen Silk, FBA, is a decorated emeritus professor author and a retired professor of classical and comparative literature at King's College, London. He was elected a member of the British Academy in 2009 and has illustrated 7 works of literature in relation to the theory and practice of tragedy and comedy, Greek poetry and drama, literary theory, and the classical tradition. [1] He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1999. [2]
Born in Birmingham on the 11th June 1941, Michael was born to parent who were Ashkenazi Jews who emigrated Poland, Warsaw 9 years prior to his birth to escape the Holocaust. He lived with his older brother John Silk. He attended King's Heath High School and then attended Cambridge in 1959 on a scholarship to study Greek Classics, where he then obtained his PhD after 8 years. This is where he met Laurel Silk (a retired podiatrist) - his wife since 1962, who he had children with. He then moved to teaching at King's College London where he became a tenured professor after teaching for 50 years, now having retired in 2017. He now a father, grandfather and great-grandfather who lives in Kent and still composes literary pieces. He is also a chess international master.
Classics or classical studies is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, classics traditionally refers to the study of Ancient Greek and Roman literature and their original languages, Ancient Greek and Latin. Classics may also include as secondary subjects Greco-Roman philosophy, history, archaeology, anthropology, art, mythology, and society.
The Western canon is the embodiment of high-culture literature, music, philosophy, and works of art that are highly cherished across the Western hemisphere, such works having achieved the status of classics.
Jonathan Culler is an American literary critic. He was Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His published works are in the fields of structuralism, literary theory and literary criticism.
Alan Douglas Edward Cameron, was a British classicist and academic. He was Charles Anthon Professor Emeritus of the Latin Language and Literature at Columbia University, New York. He was one of the leading scholars of the literature and history of the later Roman world and at the same time a wide-ranging classical philologist whose work encompassed above all the Greek and Latin poetic tradition from Hellenistic to Byzantine times but also aspects of late antique art.
Eric Alfred Havelock was a British classicist who spent most of his life in Canada and the United States. He was a professor at the University of Toronto and was active in the Canadian socialist movement during the 1930s. In the 1960s and 1970s, he served as chair of the classics departments at both Harvard and Yale. Although he was trained in the turn-of-the-20th-century Oxbridge tradition of classical studies, which saw Greek intellectual history as an unbroken chain of related ideas, Havelock broke radically with his own teachers and proposed an entirely new model for understanding the classical world, based on a sharp division between literature of the 6th and 5th centuries BC on the one hand, and that of the 4th on the other.
William Bedell Stanford was an Irish classical scholar and senator. He was Regius Professor of Greek at Trinity College Dublin from 1940 to 1980, and served as chancellor of the University of Dublin from 1982 to 1984.
Simon David Goldhill, FBA is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge. 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.
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Simon Hornblower, FBA is an English classicist and academic. He was Professor of Classics and Ancient History in the University of Oxford and, before retiring, was most recently a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.
Anthony Arthur Long FBA is a British-American classical scholar who is the Chancellor's Professor Emeritus of Classics, Irving Stone Professor of Literature Emeritus, and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.
Richard Lawrence Hunter FBA is an Australian classical scholar. From 2001 to 2021, he was the 37th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge.
Glenn Warren Most is an American classicist and comparatist originating from the US, but also working in Germany and Italy.
Leonard Robert Palmer was author and Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford from 1952 to 1971. He was also a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Palmer made some significant contributions to the study of Classical languages, and in the area of historical linguistics.
Francis Stephen Halliwell,, known as Stephen Halliwell, is a British classicist and academic. From 1995 he was Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews and Wardlaw Professor of Classics from 2014; having retired in October 2020, he is now emeritus professor. He has been elected President of the Classical Association for 2024-25.
Rosemary Julia Barrow was a Welsh art historian who specialised in classical themes in Victorian art and the painting of Lawrence Alma-Tadema in particular, whose reputation she attempted to restore.
Barbara Elizabeth Goff is a Classics Professor at the University of Reading. She specialises in Greek tragedy and its reception; women in antiquity; postcolonial classics and reception of Greek political thought.
The Department of Classics is an academic division in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London. It is one of the oldest and most distinguished university departments specialising in the study of classical antiquity in the United Kingdom.
Arthur James Beattie, MA, FRSE was a British classical philologist who was Professor of Greek at Edinburgh University from 1951 to 1981 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts, where he was notable for the advancement of the study of Classics, Greek and languages. In addition to his academic work, he also served as a cryptographer in World War II.
Michael SquireFBA is a British art historian and classicist. He became the Laurence Professor of Classical Archaeology in the University of Cambridge in 2022. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, and was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2022.
John Philip Algernon Gould, was a British classical scholar. He specialised in Greek tragedy, but also had wider interests in ancient Greek literature, ancient Greek religion and anthropology. He began his academic career as a research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge (1949–1953), and then a tutor and student at Christ Church, Oxford (1954–1968). He was Chair of Classics at the University College of Swansea from 1968 to 1974, and the H O Wills Professor of Greek at the University of Bristol from 1974 to 1991.