Gretchen Reydams-Schils

Gretchen Reydams-Schils is Professor of Liberal Studies at the University of Notre Dame, across the Departments of Philosophy and Theology. She is a specialist in Plato and the traditions of Platonism and Stoicism.

Gretchen Reydams-Schils gained a BA (magna cum laude) at the Catholic University of Leuven where she majored in Classics, with her Senior Thesis on “Plato’s ‘Myth of Er’ in the Republic”; an MA at the University of Cincinnati; and a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley. Her Classics/Ancient Philosophy dissertation was on “Stoic and Platonist Readings of Plato's Timaeus”. She acted as Research Fellow in the Institute of Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven.

She teaches at the University of Notre Dame, where she also runs the Notre Dame Workshop on Ancient Philosophy, and at the Center for Hellenic Studies. She has also held positions as Visiting Professor at the University of Bordeaux, France, in 2013; at Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry, France, in 2005; at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, in 2002; and at Spiritan Missionary Philosophy Seminary, Arusha, Tanzania, in Spring 1998 during a sabbatical. She was Directrice d’Études at the École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France, for four seminars on Calcidius, in May–June 2004.

She edited a 2003 edited volume, Plato's Timaeus as Cultural Icon which explored the influence of Plato's Timaeus and attempted to account for its cultural and philosophic status. In her 2005 book The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection, she studied the philosophical basis that underpins the way Roman Stoics integrated philosophy into the social practice of living, friendship, political community, parenting and marriage. In a review, Margaret Graver describes it as looking "beyond the Stoics' ethical absolutism to emphasise, instead, their engagement with other human beings".

She has written over 20 philosophy book reviews for learned journals including The Journal of Roman Studies, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, and Classical Philology. She has also won over 20 academic awards and honours, including a Fulbright Fellowship, Humboldt Foundation Fellowship, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Grant, and Earhart Foundation Grant.

She published a letter in the Catholic magazine Commonweal marking her discontent at a change to the Nicene Creed, during the tenure of Pope Benedict XVI, in which the phrase "

“born of the Virgin Mary” was changed to “incarnate of.” In the article she argued that the change identified "a deep strand of repulsion at the female body in the Christian tradition".