Will Shearin to join Classics Department in 2008-2009 as a Stanford Humanities Fellow

 

 

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). Currently, he teaches Ancient Greek at the University of Oregon.

His intellectual interests lie largely at the intersection of philosophy and literature, particularly in the realms of (ancient) materialism and language, where he studies the political and ethical effects (and possibilities) of language and its materialities. 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, in quite 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 has written on, among other authors, Cicero, Varro, Lucretius, and Plotinus, although he maintains interests throughout the classical and post-classical worlds.

Recently, he 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.

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