Charles Stocking specializes in the history and philosophy of the body, religion, and physical culture from Ancient Greece to the present.

Prior to his work as a scholar in Classics, he was a competitive powerlifter and professional strength and conditioning coach for UCLA Athletics, where he coached several varsity teams as well as individual Olympic athletes.

In the field of Classics, he has held fellowships from the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies and the University of South Carolina, and he was professeur invité at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris, France. 

His first monograph, The Politics of Sacrifice (Cambridge University Press, 2017) offers a new reading of the mythology of sacrifice in Archaic Poetry from a distinctly gendered perspective. His second monograph, Homer's Iliad and the Problem of Force (Oxford 2023), explores the language of force in the Iliad and the unique role this poem has played in the European philosophic tradition, from Simone Weil to the present. With Susan Stephens, he is co-author of Ancient Greek Athletics: Primary Sources in Translation (Oxford 2021), the most extensive sourcebook to date on ancient Greek sport. With Paul Christesen, he is also co-editor of A Cultural History of Sport in Antiquity (Bloomsbury 2021).

For more than a decade, he served as program coordinator for the Sport, Politics, and Culture symposium, jointly sponsored by the Harvard Center for Olympic Studies and the International Olympic Academy. And he is currently program director for a new multi-university initiative "The Sport and Education Program, from Ancient Olympia to the Present," which takes place each year in Olympia, Greece. His current research focuses on the influence of the Classical tradition on modern scientific discourses of race, gender, and health.