Research Interests
Greek literature, especially epic, tragedy, and comedy
Women and gender in Antiquity
The reception and performance of classical drama
Helene Foley is Claire Tow Professor of Classics, Emerita at Barnard College. She served as president of the American Philological Association in 1998. She gave the Martin Classical lectures in 1995 and served as Sather Professor of Classics at Berkeley in Spring 2008; she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2008.
She has been awarded research fellowships by the Loeb Classical Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment of the Humanities, the National Humanities Center, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Institute for Advanced Study, School of Historical Studies, Princeton. She received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics in 1976; the American Philological Association for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics in 1982; and the Emily Gregory Award for Outstanding Teaching at Barnard in 1989.
She is currently teaching with Gisela Cardenas a team-taught course on Performing Greek Tragedy on the Modern Stage.
Selected Publications
Ritual Irony: Poetry and Sacrifice in Euripides, Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1985.
The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Princeton University Press 1994 (Author and Editor)
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.
Co-editor (with Chris Kraus, Simon Goldhill and Ja´s Elsner) and author of an essay in, Visualizing the Tragic: Drama, Myth, and Ritual in Greek Art and Literature, Oxford University Press, 2007.
Co-edited volume with Erin B. Mee, Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage, Oxford University Press, 2011.
Reimagining Greek Tragedy on the American Stage, University of California Press, 2012.
Euripides: Hecuba in the Bloomsbury Companions to Ancient Tragedy series, ed., Tom Harrison, London, 2015.
Co-coordinator with Jean Howard of PMLA 129.4 (2014) on Tragedy. Includes our joint introductory essay.
Co-editor with Ralph Rosen of Aristophanes and Politics, essays from a Columbia Conference in fall 2106 for Columbia Series in the Classical Tradition, Brill 2020.
