David Williams is an intellectual historian focusing on the literature and philosophy of archaic and classical Greece. He is particularly interested in Athenian drama, Socrates and the Sophists, and Plato. 

Williams's current book project focuses on the comic playwright Aristophanes' engagement with contemporary intellectual culture. He has published articles related to this project in TAPA and Classical World. He is also a co-editor of and contributor to a collaborative volume on the Sophist Hippias of Elis, which is currently under contract with Oxford University Press. Finally, he has conducted and presented initial research toward a comprehensive study of gnomic statements in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. 

Williams 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 his graduate studies, he also spent a year as a Regular Member of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, where he held the Lucy Shoe Meritt Fellowship (2018-19). Before arriving at UVA, he 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).

As an incoming assistant professor with the Department of Classics, Williams is looking forward to teaching ancient Greek and Latin, as well as courses focusing on the literature, history and ideas of ancient Greece. This fall he will offer an introductory course on ancient drama ("Tragedy and Comedy") and an advanced Latin course on the Roman historian Livy.