Wilson has taught in the Classical Studies department at the
University of Pennsylvania since 2002. In 2006 Wilson received a
Rome Prize fellowship from the
American Academy in Rome for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies. Her next book,
The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (2007), was described by
Carolyne Larrington as "a sprightly and illuminating account of the events surrounding
Socrates' execution by means of a self-administered drink of hemlock; the probable historical reasons for his trial and judgment; and the ways in which later ages—from Socrates’ immediate successors among the Greeks, through the Romans, Christian apologists, Renaissance thinkers, Enlightenment sages and anxious moderns—have understood the death of Socrates". Wilson's next books focused on the Roman tragic playwright
Seneca the Younger. In 2010 she translated Seneca's tragedies, with an introduction and notes, in
Six Tragedies of Seneca. In 2014 she published
The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca, which is also published with the alternate title
Seneca: A Life. In a review of
Seneca: A Life for
Literary Review,
Tim Whitmarsh wrote: "This clever and learned book is not just a study of a protean and conflicted individual. It is also intended as a lesson for our own time. Seneca, Wilson argues, was 'Rome's most perceptive analyst of
consumerism and luxury'." Wilson became internationally known for her translation of the
Odyssey in 2018, with media attention on her becoming the first woman to publish a translation of the work into English.
The New York Times named Wilson's
Odyssey as one of its 100 notable books of 2018, and it was shortlisted for the 2018
National Translation Award. In 2019 Wilson received a
MacArthur Fellowship for her work bringing classical literature to new audiences, and she was appointed the College for Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2020 Wilson joined the
Booker Prize judging panel, alongside
Margaret Busby (chair),
Lee Child,
Sameer Rahim and
Lemn Sissay. Also in 2020 she was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship to support her work translating the
Iliad. In September 2023
W. W. Norton & Company published Wilson's English translation of the
Iliad. Wilson includes an introduction, maps, family trees, a glossary and text notes. She had developed the book over the previous six years. In a review for
London Review of Books, Colin Burrow discusses "the challenging task of translating the poem into the same number of iambic pentameter lines as there are hexameters in the original", writing: "In order to achieve that level of compression she has to rely heavily on monosyllables, and to make sharp and sometimes simplifying decisions about which of Homer’s implications to make explicit." In a review for
NPR, Annalisa Quinn wrote: "Wilson's project is basically a progressive one: to scrape away all the centuries of verbal and ideological buildup—the Christianizing (Homer predates Christianity), the nostalgia, the added sexism (the epics are sexist enough as they are), and the Victorian euphemisms—to reveal something fresh and clean." In Wilson's translation, enslaved characters are often called "slaves" rather than "maids" or "servants", with translator notes explaining the word choices; while discussing older translations of the
Odyssey with
Anna North at
Vox, Wilson said: "It sort of stuns me ... how much work seems to go into making slavery invisible." Madeline Miller also discussed Wilson's word choices, including the word
slave, and wrote: "Perhaps more controversial will be her translation of the famous first line, which Wilson gives as 'Tell me about a complicated man.'" According to
Charlotte Higgins, "Reading the
Iliad in the midst of
Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which I have reported on, brought the poem home to me in new and disturbing ways." In a review for the
New Statesman,
Rowan Williams, the former
archbishop of Canterbury, wrote: "The decision to use unrhymed iambic pentameter for the translation is a highly successful one; it is a kind of default rhythm for so much English poetry, especially for long narrative poems, a metre that unobtrusively maps on to ordinary speech patterns and holds our attention just enough to keep us in the circle during the less vivid passages."
Kirkus Reviews noted the "shortness of Wilson's lines" as compared to other translators, which, "abetted by her unfussy diction and lyricism, are easy on the reader's eye and seem to help the mind grasp the breadth of Homer’s canvas at any given moment while still marveling at details". Graeme Wood wrote for
The Atlantic that "her modern language sometimes feels distractingly modern". == Personal life ==