Rate My Professor Catharine Edwards

Catharine Edwards is Professor of Classics and Ancient History in the School of Historical Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, a position she has held since 2006. Previously, she advanced from Lecturer in 1989 to Senior Lecturer in 1997 and Reader in 1999 at the University of Bristol, followed by a Lectureship at Birkbeck from 2001; she also held a Junior Research Fellowship at Selwyn College, Cambridge from 1988 to 1989. Edwards earned her BA in Classics in 1985 and PhD in Classics in 1990 from Trinity College, Cambridge. In 2021, she was elected a Fellow of the British Academy. Her research focuses on the cultural history of the Roman world, particularly Rome in the late Republic and early Principate, examining the complex literary strategies of texts by Seneca (especially his Letters), Ovid, and Cicero. She explores themes of subjectivity, gender, self-construction, personal and social identity through language, as well as receptions of antiquity in the nineteenth century, including in works by Gibbon, Madame de Staël, T. B. Macaulay, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Augustus Hare's guidebooks.

Edwards has authored key monographs including The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 1993; second edition 2025), Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City (1996), Death in Ancient Rome (Yale University Press, 2007), and Seneca: Selected Letters (Cambridge Greek and Latin Classics, 2019). She edited Lives of the Caesars (Oxford World's Classics, 2008), Roman Presences: Receptions of Rome in European Culture, 1789-1945 (2007), and co-edited Rome the Cosmopolis with Greg Woolf (2006). Recent publications feature articles such as 'Visualising Pain: Psychotherapy, Emotion and Embodied Cognition in Seneca’s Letters' in Classical Antiquity (2021) and 'Writing Imperial Space in Letters' in Antichthon (2026). She has contributed to public discourse via BBC Radio 4's In Our Time on Agrippina the Younger, Cleopatra, Seneca the Younger, and others, and presented the BBC Four series Mothers, Murderers and Mistresses: Empresses of Ancient Rome. Edwards served on the Journal of Roman Studies editorial board from 2009 to 2014.