David Konstan
David Konstan's research focuses on ancient Greek and Latin literature, and on classical and Hellenistic philosophy. In recent years, he has investigated the emotions and value concepts of classical Greece in Rome. He has written books on friendship in the classical world, the notion of pity in both pagan and Christian thought, and most recently a study of the emotions of the ancient Greeks. He has also worked on ancient Greek physics and atomic theory, and on ancient literary theory.
Biography
David Konstan's B.A. was in mathematics; in in senior year of college, he began ancient Greek and Latin, and went on to obtain a doctorate in classics.
He has been at Brown since 1987, and since 1992 has been the John Rowe Workman Distinguished Professor of Classics and the Humanistic Tradition; he is also a Professor in Comparative Literature, and in the Graduate Faculty of Theatre, Speech and Dance. Previous to coming to Brown, he taught for 20 years at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
He has held visiting appointments at the University of Otago in New Zealand, at the University of Edinburgh, at the Universidade de São Paulo, the University of La Plata in Argentina, the University of Natal in Durban, South Africa, the University of Sydney, Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and at the American University in Cairo.
He is an Associate Editor of Arethusa, and on the Editorial Boards of Scholia, Intertexts, Apeiron, the series "Writings from the Greco-Roman World Series" of the Society of Biblical Literature, Phaos (Universidade de Campinas, Brazil), Logo: Rivista de Retórica y Teoría de la Comunicación, the Cincinnati Classical Series, and Ordia Prima (Córdoba, Argentina).
He has served as Senior Fellow for the Center for Hellenic Studies, as President of the American Philological Association, and as the American Philological Association's Alternate Delegate to the Fédération International des Associations des Etudes Classiques.
Among fellowships and awards he may list Fulbright Senior Lectureship at Monash University, a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Humanities Center Fellowship, the John H. and Penelope Biggs Resident Scholarship at Washington University in Saint Louis, a Leventis Visiting Research Professorship at the University of Edinburgh, and an Alexander S. Onassis Foundation Research Grant in Athens.
