Helen Morales
About:
Helen Morales is the James and Sarah Argyropoulos Professor in Hellenic Studies. A classicist and cultural critic, she has a wide range of interests in the ancient world. These include the ancient novel, Greek imperial poetry, mythology, literary criticism, sexual ethics, diversity, and pilgrimage. These interests are always connected to major contemporary concerns – leadership, class, race, sexual politics, aesthetics, law – a better understanding of which, in her view, comes through appreciating their investment in the classical antiquity. Helen received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and previously taught at the University of Reading, Arizona State University, and the University of Cambridge (2001-8), where she was also a Fellow of Newnham College. In 2025 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Languages at Uppsala University.
In 1998-9 she was a Fellow at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC. She has given the Gail A. Burnett Lecturer at San Diego State University (2011), the John C. Rouman Classical Lecture at the University of New Hampshire (2017), the Charles Beebe Martin Memorial Lectures at Oberlin College (2023), and the J. H. Gray Lectures at the University of Cambridge (2025).
Helen enjoys theater consultancy work, radio work, giving public lectures, and talking to local schools. She was Graduate Advisor from 2009-2014, and then Chair of the Classics Department from 2016-2019, and Interim Chair of the Music Department from 2023-2024. She is an affiliate of the Feminist Studies Department. She chairs the university’s Hellenic Studies Committee and organizes campus and public events that promote Greek culture, ancient and modern. She founded and co-directs (with Emilio Capettini) the Center for Ancient Fiction at UCSB, which has annual colloquia for graduate students, faculty, and invited participants. She serves on the Professional Ethics Committee of the Society for Classical Studies. In 2022 she was the lead curator of the exhibition Harmonia Rosales: Entwined at UCSB’s Art, Design, and Architecture Museum. It toured (with additional material) at the Brooks Museum of Art in Memphis Tennessee, and at Spelman College.
Graduate Supervision
Helen welcomes enquiries from graduate students interested in any area of Greek literature, and in modern engagements with the ancient Greek and Roman worlds.
Books
- Contemporary Art, Race, and Ancient Fiction. Princeton University Press (The Martin Lecture Series), in progress.
- Wayne Shorter and esperanza spalding’s …(Iphigenia): Interdisciplinary Approaches. (co-edited with Mario Telò) Cambridge University Press = special issue of Ramus, 2023.
- Reception in the Greco-Roman World: Literary Studies in Theory and Practice. Co-edited with Marco Fantuzzi and Tim Whitmarsh. Cambridge University Press, 2021.
- Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths. Bold Type Books, 2020.
- New Essays on Homer: Language, Violence, and Agency (co-edited with Sara Lindheim) Cambridge University Press = a special volume of Ramus, 2015.
- Pilgrimage to Dollywood. Chicago University Press, 2014.
- Greek Fiction (commissioned new translations, edited, with introduction and notes), Penguin Classics, 2011.
- Petronius, Satyricon (edited with introduction and notes), Penguin Classics, 2011.
- Classical Mythology: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2007.
- Dying For Josephus (co-edited with Simon Goldhill) = a special issue of Ramus, 2008.
- Vision and Narrative in Achilles Tatius “Leucippe and Clitophon”, Cambridge, 2004.
- Intratextuality: Greek and Roman Textual Relations (co-edited with Alison Sharrock), Oxford, 2000.
Journals
- Co-editor of Ramus: Critical Studies in Greek and Roman Literature (co-editor, with A. J. Boyle). For her editorial Ramus: thirty-five years see vol 35, no.1 (2006).
- Member (until its closure) of the editorial board of the on-line journal Eidolon which is dedicated to exploring interactions between the ancient and modern worlds.
Selected Articles
- “What Does Baubo Reveal?” in Jean-Luc Nancy’s Antiquity: Community, Art, Gender, and the Body. co-edited by Mario Telò and Daniel Orrells, forthcoming.
- “After Kehinde Wiley’s ‘A Bacchant’ after Bonnie Honig’s ‘The Bacchae: A Feminist Theory of Refusal'”, Classical Antiquity, vol 41, issue 2, 2022.
- “Feminism and Ancient Literature”, Oxford Classical Dictionary, 2019.
- “Rape, Violence, Complicity: Colluthus’s Abduction of Helen“, Arethusa vol 49.1, Winter 2016.
- “Fat Classics: Dieting, health, and the hijacking of Hippocrates”, Eidolon 2015.
- “Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the Liberian ‘sex strike,’ and the politics of reception”, Greece and Rome 60.2, Oct. 2013.
- “Phryne and the psychology and ethics of ekphrasis”, in Cambridge Classical Journal, 2011.
- “Challenging some orthodoxies: the politics of genre and the ancient Greek novel” in Grammatiki Karla ed. Fiction on the Fringe. Novelistic Writing in the Post-Classical Age. (Leiden/Boston, 2009), 1-12
- “The History of Sexuality”, in Tim Whitmarsh ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel (Cambridge, 2008), 39-55.
- “Marrying Mesopotamia: Female Sexuality and Cultural Resistance in Iamblichus” Babylonian Tales” in Ramus vol 35 no. 1 (2006), 78-101.
- “Metaphor, Gender, and the Ancient Greek Novel”, in Stephen Harrison, Michael Paschalis and Stavros Frangoulidis eds. Metaphor and the Ancient Novel (Groningen, 2005), 1-22.
- “Sense and Sententiousness in the Ancient Greek Novels” in Sharrock and Morales eds. Intratextuality (see above, Oxford, 2000), 67-88.
- “Constructing Gender in Musaeus” Hero and Leander” in Richard Miles ed. Constructing Identities in Late Antiquity (London, 1999), 41-69.
- “The Torturer”s Apprentice: Parrhasius and the Limits of Art”, in Jas Elsner ed. Art and Text in the Roman World (Cambridge, 1996), 182-209.
- “The Taming of the View: Natural Curiosities in Leukippe and Kleitophon”, Groningen Colloquia on the Novel 6 (1995), 39-50.
Current Project
- Contemporary Art, Race, and Ancient Fiction.