Emily Wilson

Emily Wilson earned a BA in classics from Balliol College, University of Oxford, a MPhil in Renaissance English literature from Corpus Christi College, and a PhD in classics and comparative literature from Yale University.

Wilson is the author of Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys Through Ancient Literature (Profile Books, 2026); The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford University Press, 2014); The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Harvard University Press, 2007); and Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 

Wilson is the translator of both Homer’s The Iliad (W. W. Norton, 2023) andThe Odyssey (W. W. Norton, 2017). She also translated a Norton Critical Edition of Oedipus Tyrannos (W. W. Norton, 2021). Wilson contributed translations to Modern Library’s The Greek Plays: Sixteen Plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides (Modern Library, 2017), edited by Mary Lefkowitz and James Romm.

Wilson is the department chair and professor of classical studies at the University of Pennsylvania, holding the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities. She has been named a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in Renaissance and early modern scholarship, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Guggenheim Fellow. She lives in Philadelphia.