Barnard College Department of Classics and Ancient Studies

Helene P. Foley

Professor Foley graduated from Swarthmore College (1964), received an MAT in English (1966) and an MA in Classics (1967) from Yale University and a PHD in Classical Philology from Harvard University (1975). She moved from Stanford University to Barnard in 1979. She has also taught as a visiting professor at Dartmouth, New York University, and Berkeley. She has served as president of the American Philological Association in 1998 and will be Sather Professor of Classics at Berkeley in Spring 2008.

Her research interests focus on Greek literature, especially epic, tragedy, and comedy; women and gender in Antiquity; and the reception of classical drama. She is the author of Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, Cornell University Press, 1985; The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Princeton University Press, 1994; Women in the Classical World: Image and Text, co-authored with Elaine Fantham, Natalie Kampen, Sarah Pomeroy, and Alan Shapiro, Oxford University Press, 1994; Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (=Martin Classical Lectures 1995), Princeton University Press, 2001. She is editor of Reflections of Women in Antiquity, Gordon and Breach, 1981 and a co-editor of Visualizing the Tragic, Oxford University Press, 2007.

She is currently working on her Sather classical lectures on the reception of Greek tragedy on the U.S. stage.

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