Emily Greenwood is a historian of classical antiquity and comparative literature, whose research centers on ancient Greek historiography—especially Thucydides and Herodotus—and how classical texts have been received within Black and postcolonial traditions. She is the author of the award-winning Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (2010), which received the Runciman Prize in 2011. Her scholarship investigates the appropriation and reinvention of Greco-Roman classics across local, transnational, and diasporic contexts from the nineteenth century to the present. 

Since July 2023, Greenwood has been the James F. Rothenberg Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature Chair at Harvard University, with affiliate membership in African and African American Studies. Prior to this, she served as Laurance S. Rockefeller Professor of Classics and Human Values at Princeton University and held the John M. Musser Professorship and Chair of Classics at Yale University. In 2023, she was elected an honorary fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, and named an international fellow of the British Academy.