1945. Later in life, he reflected on the events of his wartime service in a 1997 memoir entitled Towards The Aegean Sea. After the End of World War II, Kirk returned to Cambridge to resume his studies towards the Classical Tripos. He was most influenced by his tutor at Clare College, the historian of ancient Greece N. G. L. Hammond, and by the Hellenist Harry Sandbach. In 1946, he graduated BA with First Class Honours. Career Beginnings at Trinity Hall Kirk's first academic position was a research fellowship at Trinity Hall, Cambridge. However, he spent much of his time away from the college. A stint at British School at Athens (1947—1948) was followed by a period as a Commonwealth Fund Fellow at Harvard University, lasting from 1949 to 1950. In 1950, Kirk married the artist Barbara Traill, with whom he had one daughter. He then took up a permanent position at Cambridge. Working as an assistant lecturer in ancient Greek literature, he was elected a fellow of Trinity Hall. 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. 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). He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1959 at just thirty eight years of age. Professorships in the United States and England In 1965, Kirk returned to the United States and took up a professorship of classics at Yale University. He held this appointment until 1970. During this period, he also spent a year as the Sather Professor of Classical Literature at the University of California, Berkeley and delivered the 1968 Sather Classical Lectures entitled Myth: Its Meaning and Functions. 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. However, his tenure did not last long: in 1973, Denys Page had retired from the Regius Chair of Greek at Cambridge. The following year, Kirk was elected to succeed Page and became the 35th holder of the