Trained at Berkeley and Harvard, he is a specialist in Homer and in the history of writing.
[citation needed] Powell is currently the Halls-Bascom Professor of Classics Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
[1] Powell's study Homer and the Origin of the Greek Alphabet advances the controversial thesis that a single man invented the Greek alphabet expressly in order to record the poems of Homer.
[3] He attempts to create a scientific terminology and taxonomy for the study of writing.
Powell has also translated a number of works, including the Iliad,[4] the Odyssey, the Aeneid and the poems of Hesiod.