Will Shearin

Mellon Humanities Fellow
BA Stanford 2000
PhD UC Berkeley 2007

Wilson (Will) Shearin received his undergraduate degree in Classics (Greek and Latin) from Stanford (B.A. 2000), and his M.A. (Latin, 2003) and Ph.D. (Classics, December 2007) from the University of California, Berkeley. He also has studied (on a Fulbright/Bundesstipendium) in the Philosophy Department at the Université de Fribourg (in Switzerland).

His intellectual interests lie largely at the intersection of philosophy and literature, where he is interested in both philosophical and theoretical approaches to literature and literary approaches to philosophical texts.

His dissertation, "Atomic Politics: Speech Acts in Lucretius' De rerum natura," makes a case, based upon surviving fragments of Epicurus' work, that ancient Epicurean analyses of language anticipated, at times in explicit fashion, modern speech act theory. It then uses this fact to read our longest surviving Epicurean work, Lucretius' De rerum natura ("On the Nature of Things"), particularly with regard to the deployment of promises and names within the poem. The work ultimately drives towards articulating a "democratic," or egalitarian, politics of Lucretius' poem.

He also has been involved in the editing and organizing of a volume on the reception of Epicureanism in the (largely European) West throughout history. For this volume, Hedonic Reading, he has written both on modern critical approaches to reception studies and Cornelius Nepos' Atticus.

A new, developing research project focuses on stupidity in Roman philosophy.

Free (and often not-so-free) moments are spent running - he ran the SF marathon in 2004 and 2009 - and caring for his four-year old son, Benoît.