Faculty Profiles

Nigel Nicholson is the Walter Mintz Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Humanities. He has been at Reed since 1995, and received a congratulatory first from Oxford University and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He teaches Greek and Latin language, literature and culture classes, as well as Hum 110, the first-year Humanities class on the Ancient Mediterranean, Mexico and the Harlem Renaissance. His research focuses on Greek athletics and politics, lyric poetry, elite display, medicine, and Sicily and southern Italy. He is the author of four books: Victory and Celebration: An Introduction to Greek Athletics (Oxford University Press, 2025); The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition and the Deinomenid Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015); Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2005); and, jointly with Dr. Nathan Selden of Oregon Health and Sciences University, The Rhetoric of Medicine: Contemporary Lessons from Ancient Greece (Oxford University Press, 2019). He also edited a special issue of the "Paedagogus" section of Classical World 108 (2015) on teaching literary theory to graduates and undergraduates in Classics. He is currently working with two colleagues from the universities of British Columbia and Rome Tor Vergata on an edited collection of essays on Ancient Sicily from the Paleolithic period to the Middle Ages, also for Oxford University Press. He also serves on the editorial board of Classical Antiquity, the leading West-Coast Classics journal. Nigel was named Oregon Professor of the Year in 2005 and served for seven years as Reed’s Dean of the Faculty, 2013-2020.