Peter Struck is the Stephen A. Levin Family Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Vartan Gregorian Professor of Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2009 to 2023, Struck was director of the Benjamin Franklin Scholars (BFS) and has served in other leadership roles have included chairing the School of Arts & Sciences Curriculum Committee and the School of Arts & Sciences Continuing Education Committee, as well as serving as chair of the Department of Classical Studies from 2016 to 2022. Struck’s award-winning teaching has taken many forms. He was one of the first Penn Arts & Sciences faculty to engage in online instruction and his Greek and Roman Mythology massive open online course on Coursera has enrolled nearly 250,000 students to date. For his teaching, Struck has earned the University’s Lindback Award, the School of Arts & Sciences Dean’s Award for Innovation in Teaching, and the College of General Studies Distinguished Teaching Award. 

Struck’s scholarship centers on Greek and Roman history of ideas, philosophy, and myth. He has published many works, including Birth of the Symbol: Ancient Readers at the Limits of Their Texts (2004), and Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Antiquity (2016), both of which received the Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit for best book in classical studies. In 2023, he co-edited A Cultural History of Ideas: Volumes 1–6, with Sophia Rosenfeld which won the 2023 Prose Award for Best Humanities Reference Work from the American Association of Publishers. 

From 2009 to 2012, Struck founded and co-directed the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education, which worked to advance leadership in the humanities among early career faculty.