Profile
The Director of the Institute is responsible to the School and the University; she represents the Institute both at home and abroad, guiding its policies and development in consultation with colleagues to ensure that the Institute fulfils its role in promoting and facilitating research in Classics and related disciplines, nationally and internationally. The Director also serves as General Editor of the Institute's Publications.
Katherine joined the Institute in October 2021 from the University of Reading, where she was Professor of Classics and Intellectual History. She is an interdisciplinary classicist whose research spans the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in European culture from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, the history of political thought and gender history. She is known particularly for her work on the eighteenth-century scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the so-called 'father' of classical archaeology, and has also published on authors ranging from Sappho, Thucydides and Pausanias to Hannah Arendt and Walter Pater. She is currently working on a study of Winckelmann's queer love letters and is also principal investigator of 'Beyond Notability: Re-evaluating Women's Work in Archaeology, History and Heritage in Britain, 1870 - 1950', a three-year (2021 - 24) project that explores the potential of historical archives to uncover hidden histories of scholarship and is pioneering new modes of public engagement in partnership with the Society of Antiquaries of London.