Faculty

Gwenda-lin Grewal is the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language &  Assistant Professor of Ancient Philosophy at NSSR.

For me, philosophy involves a dialogue between the ordinary and the strange. This is played out between self and world and self and self in the tension between thinking and being—a tension that, if we are to believe Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, would be best resolved by practicing "dying and being dead." At its least morbid, this would mean devoting oneself paradoxically to neutralizing one's own bias and interest, a task which seems to bring with it a curious (yet damning) pleasure, when one discovers one’s own estrangement in a moment of insight or connection. Philosophy must be suspicious about its own goodness too. How does one understand the goodness of the true? This question transfixes, and reflects within it questions of existence, meaning, and nothing, but especially nothing, which may be the strangest and most ordinary omission of all.

PhD 2010, Philosophy & Classics (Joint Degree), Tulane University

BA 2006, Philosophy & Classics, Sarah Lawrence College

Books:

• Fashion | Sense: On Philosophy & Fashion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022)
• Thinking of Death in Plato’s Euthydemus: A Close Reading and New Translation (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Translations: 

• Plato’s Phaedo, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018
• Plato’s Euthydemus (in Thinking of Death in Plato’s Euthydemus), Oxford University Press, 2022
• Plato's Cratylus, New Alexandria, forthcoming 
• Other Translations (annotated and printed for use in courses):    Plato’s Menexenus, Minos, Crito, Lesser Hippias, Theages, Timaeus

Edited Collections:

• Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato, editor, Classics@22, Center for Hellenic Studies, 2022

Some Recent Essays:

• "Fashion's Solidity" in Living Debates (forthcoming from Bloomsbury)
• "Fashion's Psyche," Review of Valerie Steele's FIT exhibition, "Dress, Dreams, Desire" (forthcoming from Fashion Theory)
• "Non-being Loves to Hide," Review of Dmitri Nikulin's Non-Being in Ancient Thought, Ancient Philosophy, Volume 46, Spring 2026.
• "The Soul of Mirrors: On Lucretius' De Rerum Natura" (GFPJ, Vol. 46, No. 1, 2025)
• "Obsolete History and Twilight Metaphysics: On Heidegger's 'Der Spruch des Anaximander'" (Bollettino della Società Filosofica Italiana, No. 1, 2024)
• "Truth in Joking: On Aristophanes' Comic School" in Paideia on Stage, eds. Phillip Mitsis, Heather Reid, and Victoria Pichugina (Parnassos Press, 2023)
• "A punk by any other name would smell as rotten" in Punk Rock and Philosophy, eds. Josh Heter and Richard Greene (Carus, 2022)
• “A Note on Plato’s Euthydemus 304b” (on Pindar) in Classics@22: Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato, Washington D.C.: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2022
•  “How Philosophers Look,” Review of Nickolas Pappas’s The Philosopher’s New Clothes: The Theaetetus, the Academy, and Philosophy’s Turn Against Fashion, Ancient Philosophy, 41, Spring 2021
• For more see my website www.gwengrewal.com

Selected Other Media:

Revolutionary Ideals and The Temptations of Tyranny

Doll Power

LA RB, Fashioning Death

The Philosophy of Ripped Jeans

Bernie's Mittens