Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Below, we share with you an announcement from Harvard’s Dean of Arts and Humanities, Professor Robin Kelsey, concerning the transition in directorship of the Center for Hellenic Studies:
From: Arts and Humanities Division
Subject: CHS Director Announcement
Date: July 13, 2021
Dear Colleagues of the Center for Hellenic Studies,
It gives me great pleasure to confirm that, as of July 1, Mark Schiefsky, the C. Lois P. Grove Professor of the Classics at Harvard University, has begun his service as Director of the Center for Hellenic Studies. A long-time affiliate of the Center, Mark has been a Senior Fellow at CHS since 2013, and Associate Director since 2017. He will succeed Gregory Nagy, the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature, who served as Director from 2000 until 2021. I am incredibly grateful to Greg for his years of dedicated leadership of CHS and am looking forward to the next chapter of development under Mark’s guidance.
Mark is a historian of philosophy and science in the ancient world in Harvard’s Department of the Classics. His work is concerned with the ways in which philosophy interacted with science in Greco-Roman antiquity: how philosophical theories shaped and were shaped by scientific inquiry in various domains, including medicine, mechanics, mathematics, and astronomy. In recent years he has been working on the reception of ancient Greek philosophy and science, particularly in the Arabic-speaking world but also in the Renaissance. His work in digital humanities has focused both on creating structured digital corpora and on developing software to apply techniques from natural language processing to the study of texts in a variety of languages.
Since joining the Harvard faculty in 2000, Mark has served as departmental chair in Classics from 2011 to 2018, as well as director of undergraduate studies, director of graduate studies, and editorial board member of Harvard Studies in Classical Philology. He received bachelor’s degrees from the University of Michigan and the University of Cambridge, and his doctorate in Classical Philosophy from Harvard University.
I am confident that Mark will build upon his experiences in the community of the Center for Hellenic Studies to shape a compelling academic and intellectual vision for the Center’s future. Please join me in congratulating Mark and welcoming him to his role as Director.
With best wishes,
Robin
Robin Kelsey
Dean of Arts and Humanities
S. C. Burden Professor of Photography
Harvard University
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Cambridge, MA 02138
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