Geoffrey Stephen Kirk, DSC, FBA ((1921-12-03)3 December 1921 – (2003-03-10)10 March 2003) was a British classicist who served as the 35th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge.

Born into a middle-class family in Nottingham, he began studying classics at Clare College, Cambridge but joined the Royal Navy during World War II.

In 1974, having gained a reputation as a leading Hellenist through the publication of his first major study (Heraclitus: the Cosmic Fragments, 1954), he succeeded Denys Page as the Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge.

His parents were Frederic Kirk, an educational administrator at Northampton Polytechnic and World War I veteran,[1] and his wife Enid.

[6] Unusually for his time, Kirk attained a series of promotions in his first decade as a tenured academic: he was made a university lecturer in 1952 and a reader in 1961.

[2] The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the publication of several monographs which helped to establish his international reputation as a scholar of archaic Greece: he edited the fragments of the philosopher Heraclitus (1954), wrote a study on the poems of Homer (1962), and, together with classicist John Raven, co-edited a volume on pre-Socratic philosophy (1958).

[3] Having spent five years in North America, Kirk returned to the United Kingdom when offered the chair of Greek at the University of Bristol in 1971.

Continuing for some time to live at their house in Woodbridge, Suffolk, he and his wife later moved to Bath and finally settled in Fittleworth, West Sussex.

While he was the sole author of the first two volumes, the remaining ones were published in co-operation with fellow classicists Mark W. Edwards, Richard Janko,[10] Nicholas Richardson, and John B.

[12] Co-authored with John Raven, his 1959 book The Presocratic Philosophers became, in the words of Hellenist Hugh Lloyd-Jones, "an invaluable substitute" for previous treatments of the topic.

In this area, he was under the influence of his Cambridge predecessor Denys Page who had held that the poems were products of an oral tradition of poetry.

Kirk's Songs of Homer (1962) presented a more nuanced expression of Page's views and treated the poems' transition from oral to written forms.