
Gwenda-lin Grewal, the Onassis Lecturer in Ancient Greek Thought and Language, has a joint PhD in Philosophy and Classics from Tulane University. Her recent work includes a translation of Plato’s Phaedo (Center for Hellenic Studies, 2018), and two books: Thinking of Death: On Plato’s Euthydemus (with a translation; in review) and Philosophy & Fashion: On Good Looks & Good Looking (forthcoming from Bloomsbury Academic). The former interprets the Euthydemus as set in a ghost world of sophistry, wherein words are stripped of their referents and Socrates encounters the shade of his reputation in the city’s eyes. The latter traces the antithesis between philosophy and fashion to Greek antiquity, and inverts the cliché that fashion is superficial and philosophy deep by suggesting that fashion points beyond the surface and philosophy is guilty of judging by looks.
In addition to Plato and fashion, Grewal has a broad range of research interests: philosophy and poetry, the reception of ancient Greek philosophy (especially in Lucretius, Machiavelli, Nietzsche, and Heidegger), and problems of translation and language, particularly as they result from the philosophical nature of Greek grammar. She is currently editing a collection of essays, Poetic (Mis)quotations in Plato (forthcoming from the Center for Hellenic Studies) — which asks about the intention or lack thereof of Plato’s seemingly altered quotations of poets — and working on an interpretation and translation of Plato’s Cratylus, which explores etymology’s relationship to truth seeking and similar intimations in Yâska’s Nirukta. She is also finishing three co-translations: Plato’s Alcibiades I, Menexenus, and Laches.
Before joining The New School for Social Research, Grewal previously held teaching positions at Vassar, Sarah Lawrence, and the University of Dallas in both Italy and Texas. She has been a visiting scholar at Harvard, the Center for Hellenic Studies, and the American Academy in Rome. She is also the recipient of an H.B. Earhart Doctoral Fellowship (2006-2010), an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Humanities (Yale, 2010-2012), and a Blegen Research Fellowship in Greek and Roman Studies (Vassar, 2019-2020).