Kate Gilhuly

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Kate Gilhuly is an assistant professor of classical studies at Wellesley College. She works on gender, sexuality, and subjectivity in ancient Greek literature and is currently finishing a manuscript, “Discourses of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens,” in which she investigates typologies of women in the Athenian social imaginary.

As a Radcliffe fellow, Gilhuly will write a book that addresses the ways in which Athenians represented the erotic practices of various geographic regions, especially the sexual reputations of Corinth, Lesbos, and Sparta. Corinth was thought of as a hotbed of prostitution; Lesbos had varying historically determined connotations but was always associated with uninhibited and adventurous sexuality; and Sparta was identified with pederasty. She will also examine the privileged position that ancient Greece occupies in the modern study of the history of sexuality.

Gilhuly received her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000. She was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University from 2000 to 2001. Her articles on Lucian’s Dialogues of the Courtesans have been published in the American Journal of Philology and in Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006).