D. David Williams
Assistant Professor of Classics
Office Address: Cocke Hall B011
Fall 2026 Office Hours: Wednesdays 1:00pm-3:00pm
David Williams is an Assistant Professor of Classics. He is an intellectual historian focusing on the literature and philosophy of archaic and classical Greece.
Research Interests
My research focuses primarily on classical Greek literature and philosophy, especially Athenian drama, Socrates and the sophists, and Plato. I am working on a number of long-term research projects. In my current book project, I reassess the comic playwright Aristophanes’ critique of contemporary intellectual culture. Situating his plays in the context of classical Greek intellectual history, I argue that Aristophanes represents the most significant surviving voice of what I call an Attic Counter-Enlightenment, a forceful reaction against the emerging intellectualism of fifth-century Athens. With Christopher Moore and Davide Napoli, I am co-editing Hippias of Elis: Texts, Translations, and Commentary, which is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. This collaborative volume will be the first comprehensive edition of the texts connected to the life, works, and reception of the sophist Hippias and the first holistic assessment of his place in the intellectual history of classical Greece. With my colleagues Ivana Petrovic and Andrej Petrovic, I have begun work toward a volume on ancient Greek conceptions of the relationship between justice and the divine. Finally, I have undertaken preliminary research for a comparative study of the use of gnomic statements in the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, which I plan to return to for my second book project. Additional in-progress research includes smaller projects on some staging issues in Aristophanes’ Clouds and on the Aristophanic scholia.
Selected Publications
“Aristophanes and the Persecution of Intellectuals in Classical Athens.” Classical Philology 121.4 (Fall 2026): 501–525.
"'Love's Philosophy": Aeschylus Fr. 44 and the Cosmological Power of Erōs.” American Journal of Philology 146.4 (Winter 2025): 591-629.
“A Penny for His Thoughts? Socrates ‘the Sophist’ and the Problem of Payment in Aristophanes’ Clouds,” Classical World 117.3 (Spring 2024): 235–57.
“Socrates and ‘the Sophists’ in Old Comedy,”Transactions of the American Philological Association 151.2 (Autumn 2022): 345–79.
Personal
I received a joint Ph.D. (2022) and M.A. (2016) from the Department of Classics and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. During my graduate studies, I also spent a year as a Regular Member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (2018-19) and another as a visiting student at the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (2021-22). Before arriving at UVA, I was a Solmsen Fellow at the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2023-24) and a visiting scholar in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2022-23).