Paul Jungwirth received his B.A. from Willamette University in 1999 with a major in English and a minor in Mathematics. He studied at the Harvard Extension School from 2001–2005, at St. Tikhon's Orthodox Seminary in 2005–2006, and in Penn's Post-baccaluareate Program in CLST during 2007–2008. Paul entered the Penn Ph.D. program the following year.

He is interested in the poetic expression of ideas in Greek epic and tragedy, especially conceptions of virtue and the good life. More particularly, he is curious how suitable an Aristotelian notion of telos is to explaining duty and social roles, and how inclusion and exclusion were used to establish meaning and promote social cohesion. One lens for this study could be Greek ideas of a good death and how they dealt with aging. Paul is also interested in classical approaches to knowledge and literary interpretation. How did the Greeks evaluate the veracity of knowledge claims? How did they argue for a text's meaning? For instance, he would like to study the Homeric tradition of allegorical interpretation and textual criticism and to investigate how this tradition influenced early Christian approaches to the biblical canon.