Nicholas F. Jones

I was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.  After earning a B.A. in Philosophy at USC while simultaneously studying ancient Greek, I changed fields when entering graduate study at the University of California in Berkeley where I took the M.A. in Greek and the Ph.D. in Classics. At Berkeley, I studied under historians in both the Classics and History departments before embarking to Greece to spend two academic years at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (ASCSA). Accompanied by my Berkeley Classicist wife Marilyn Morgan Jones, I traveled throughout Greece with the ASCSA, was recruited for one season of excavation at Nemea with the UCB team, took a side trip to Turkey, and made progress on my dissertation. Returning to the US to take up a faculty position in Pittsburgh, I have taught a wide range of courses in Greek, Latin, and Classical civilization, including the lecture courses I created in mythology, gender studies, athletics, and law & society. My published research is mostly confined to ancient Greek history and in particular to the institutions, society, and culture of Classical and Hellenistic Athens. Recently I completed editions, translations, and commentaries on 37 historical writers on Athens for Brill’s New Jacoby, the new online edition of Felix Jacoby’s monumental Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker, while I continue on at BNJ as one of a dozen editors. Along the way, I was supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Program (for study in Greece), the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Endowment for the Humanities—the last held while a visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. In Spring 2005, I was Hyde Fellow in Classics at the University of Pennsylvania. At present, I am in the preliminary stages of exploring the place of Classics in the life and writings of Henry David Thoreau and the other American transcendentalists.

With my retirement at the end of the 2019-2020 academic year, I continue to pursue my research remotely in my home office and library at our long-time home in the North Hills suburbs of Pittsburgh. Brill has undertaken a second edition of the New Jacoby, and I am kept busy with the revision of my entries. Meanwhile, my lifelong interest in the writings, life, and times of Thoreau occupies my attention on several fronts.