Joshua Timothy Katz (born September 12, 1969) is an American linguist and classicist who was the Cotsen Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University until May 2022.
[4][5] In 2021, The Daily Princetonian reported that Katz had been suspended in 2018 for engaging in a consensual sexual relationship with a student in violation of university policy.
After graduating from Yale, Katz attended the University of Oxford on a Marshall Scholarship and earned a master's degree in general linguistics and comparative philology in 1993.
[9] He was praised by the university for “the care he takes with students in and out of the classroom” and was recognized as one of four faculty members for outstanding teaching in 2003,[10] with a class of his making The Daily Beast's list of "hottest college courses" in 2011.
[20] The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal and columnist Rod Dreher praised Katz for speaking out against cancel culture once the story reached national attention.
[26][27][independent source needed] On July 27, Katz wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled "I Survived Cancellation at Princeton" and noted that a message of condemnation on the Department of Classics' website had been taken down.
[20][28] As a result of the controversy, the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) revoked an invitation for Katz to be a volunteer delegate for ALCS to the Union Académique Internationale conference in Paris.
[4][5] The Wall Street Journal published an opinion article by Katz soon after, in which he alleged that the university had fired him for political reasons and had misrepresented his positions to provoke dissent.
[34] In July 2021, Katz married Solveig Gold, a doctoral candidate in classics at University of Cambridge, who graduated from Princeton in 2017 and is one of his former undergraduate students.