David Konstan

Professor of Classics, New York University

David Konstan earned his BA in Mathematics and his Ph.D. in Greek and Latin at Columbia University,
New York. He taught for twenty years at Wesleyan University, Middletown, CT, and twenty-three
years at Brown University, Providence, RI (where he is Professor Emeritus of Classics and
Comparative Literature) before joining New York University in 2010. He has been a visiting scholar
at various universities and a Fellow at the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, NC, and
the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Konstan’s research
focuses on Greek and Roman literature and philosophy, and more particularly on emotions and values
in classical antiquity.

Among Konstan’s publications are Roman Comedy (1983), Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel
and Related Genres (1994), Greek Comedy and Ideology (1995), Friendship in the Classical World (1997),
Pity Transformed (2001), The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature
(2006), A Life Worthy of the Gods: The Materialist Psychology of Epicurus (2008), Before Forgiveness:
The Origins of a Moral Idea (2010), and Beauty: The Fortunes of an Ancient Greek Idea (2014).

Konstan is a past president of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies);
he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and an Honorary Fellow of the Australian
Academy of the Humanities.

At SCAS, Konstan will pursue research on gratitude, loyalty, and the question of reciprocity in the classical
world.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2016-17.