Gregory Nagy

Born Böszörményi-Nagy Gergely in Budapest, Hungary, Gregory Nagy immigrated to the United States as a young child with his family. Nagy went on to study at Indiana University and then Harvard, where he earned his PhD in classical philology and linguistics.

Today, Nagy is one of the country’s foremost scholars in the field of Homeric and related Greek studies, having lectured widely across North America and Europe on these topics. He is the Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, where he has been on the faculty since 1975. Nagy’s special research interests include archaic Greek literature and oral traditions, and he is renowned for extending theories about the oral composition-in-performance of the Iliad and Odyssey.

Discussing the epics with The Harvard Crimson, he said, “They are an expression of what it means to be educated, what it means to be wise. To us, they are narratives, but for many societies, the narrative is a way of organizing reality, what a society’s values are.”

Nagy is a renowned teacher and was an advocate and pioneer for open access learning. His online course on the ancient Greek hero has enrolled more than 180,000 students worldwide since its launch in 2013.

For his landmark work on classical Greek poetry, Nagy was appointed Commander of the Order of Honor by the president of Greece in 2019. He also received the American Philological Association’s Goodwin Award of Merit for The Best of the Achaeans, one of more than a dozen books he has authored, and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors.

Photo by Antonia Nagy. Published June 2026