Rate My Professor David Fearn

Professor David Fearn serves as Professor of Greek and Head of the Department of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick, a role he assumed in 2023 after joining the department in 2008. His distinguished academic career includes several prestigious fellowships: a joint Junior Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (2003–2005) and Corpus Christi College, Oxford (PS Allen Junior Research Fellowship in Classics, 2005–2007), followed by a Mellon Career Development/Junior Research Fellowship at Jesus College and the Faculty of Classics, Oxford (2007). Fearn's educational background is rooted at Magdalen College, University of Oxford, where he earned a BA/MA in Literae Humaniores with a Double First (1998), an MSt in Greek and/or Latin Languages and Literature with Distinction (1999), and a DPhil in Greek Literature (2003), based on his doctoral thesis on the Greek choral lyric poet Bacchylides supervised by Peter Parsons and Peter Wilson. He also completed the PCAPP at the University of Warwick in 2011.

Fearn's research centers on the poetics, aesthetics, and socio-political contextualizability of archaic and classical Greek literature, particularly lyric poetry, with ongoing focus on Pindar. He investigates Greek literary texts across socio-political and cultural contexts from antiquity to modernity, employing critical-theoretical, comparativist, ecocritical, biopolitical, phenomenological, and art-historical approaches. Additional interests include classical Greek historiographical imagination, the cultural history of modern papyrological discoveries, and relations between ancient texts and contemporary photography, environmental art, and philosophy. Key publications include Bacchylides: Politics, Performance, Poetic Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2007); editor of Aegina: Contexts for Choral Lyric Poetry: Myth, History, and Identity in the Fifth Century BC (Oxford University Press, 2010); Pindar's Eyes: Visual and Material Culture in Epinician Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2017); Greek Lyric of the Archaic and Classical Periods: From The Past to the Future of the Lyric Subject (Brill, 2020); 'Olympic trees', Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 29.2 (2025); and 'Pindar and the nature of contemplation' in Texts, Temporalities, Ideologies (Bloomsbury, 2024). He delivered his Professorial inaugural lecture 'The Future of the Lyric Encounter' (2022), hosted international symposia such as 'Heidegger's Greece' (2018) and 'Classics in Relation' (2020), and serves on university committees including the Senate (2023–), Arts Faculty Steering Group (2025–), and Staff Wellbeing Working Group (2024–). Fearn is a member of the Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature, and the Arts, the Environmental Humanities Network, the Classical Association, and the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and acts as a referee for leading journals and publishers.