Grant Parker

Grant Parker works on Latin literature, monumentality and digital humanities in a comparative framework. He joined Stanford from Duke University in 2006, having studied at the University of Cape Town and Princeton University and serving as a postdoc at the University of Michigan spanning the new millennium. He teaches Latin as well as Greco-Roman literature in comparative contexts. More recent work has focused on global receptions of Virgil, especially the Eclogues and Georgics. One of his first publications was The Agony of Asar: a thesis on slavery by the former slave, Jacobus Elisa Johannes Capitein, 1717-1747 (Markus Wiener Publishers 2001), and he continues to be interested in comparative approaches to enslavement. Since January 2024 he has divided his position between the Department of Classics and the new Department of African and African American Studies.

As a joint 2025-26 IAJS and Stanford Impact Labs Fellow, Parker will look at the stories of marginalized communities in post-apartheid South Africa, which are often inaccessible due to resource constraints and institutional barriers. This challenge of cultural preservation in resource-constrained environments is a global one. Parker will work with museums and schools in South Africa to develop scalable methodologies to preserve suppressed histories.