Nigel Nicholson
Walter Mintz Professor of Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and Humanities
Greek, Latin, and Ancient Mediterranean Studies Department
Division of Literature and Languages
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 his B.A. from Oxford University and his 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 three books: Aristocracy and Athletics in Archaic and Classical Greece (Cambridge University Press, 2005); The Poetics of Victory in the Greek West: Epinician, Oral Tradition and the Deinomenid Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015); 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 on two more books for Oxford University Press, one a study of Greek athletics through the statues and poetry used to commemorate victors, and one a volume on Sicily from the Paleolithic period to the Middle Ages, edited jointly with colleagues from the University of British Columbia and the University of Rome Tor Vergata. He was named Oregon Professor of the Year in 2005 and served for seven years as Reed’s Dean of the Faculty, 2013-2020.