Stephen Halliwell (classicist)
Francis Stephen Halliwell, FBA, FRSE (born 1953) is a British classicist and academic. From 1995 he was Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews and served as Wardlaw Professor of Classics from 2014. He retired in October 2020 and is now an emeritus professor. He was President of the Classical Association for 2024–25.
Halliwell was born in Wigan, Lancashire, England, and grew up in Liverpool, where he attended St Francis Xavier’s College. He studied Literae humaniores (classics) at Worcester College, Oxford, earning a first-class BA in 1976 and a DPhil in 1981. His doctoral thesis was titled “Personal jokes in Aristophanes,” supervised by Sir Kenneth Dover.
He has taught at Oxford, London, Cambridge (as a Fellow of Corpus Christi College), and Birmingham, with visiting positions at the University of Chicago, UC Riverside, Roma Tre University, McMaster University, Université catholique de Louvain, and Cornell University.
Halliwell was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in 2011 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2014. His research spans ancient Greek literature and philosophy, including Homer, Aristophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Neoplatonism. He is best known for work on ancient Greek comedy and on Greek philosophical poetics and aesthetics.
David Konstan described him as “the ideal close reader” for tackling big cultural questions through careful text analysis. His books include The Aesthetics of Mimesis, which won the Premio Europeo di Estetica in 2008, and Greek Laughter, which won the Criticos Prize (now the London Hellenic Prize) in 2008. He has delivered about 200 invited papers in 18 countries and has appeared on BBC radio programs such as In Our Time. His work has been translated into nine languages.
In 1978 he married Helen Ruth Gainford; they have two sons and separated in 2010.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:22 (CET).