American Philosophical Society
Member History

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Residency
Resident (1)
Class
Subdivision
404a[X]
1Name:  Dr. Kathleen Mary Coleman
 Institution:  Harvard University
 Year Elected:  2021
 Class:  4. Humanities
 Subdivision:  404a
 Residency:  Resident
 Living? :   Living
 Birth Date:  1953
   
 
Kathleen Coleman specializes in Latin literature and the social history and material culture of the early Roman empire. She was born in what is now Harare, Zimbabwe, in 1953. After taking degrees at the University of Cape Town and the University of Rhodesia (now the University of Zimbabwe), she received her DPhil from the University of Oxford in 1979. She then returned to the University of Cape Town to join the faculty, before taking up the Chair of Latin (1870) at Trinity College Dublin in 1993. In 1998 she moved to Harvard University, where she was named the James Loeb Professor of the Classics in 2010. She has published editions, with commentary, of Book 4 of the Siluae of Statius and the Liber spectaculorum of Martial, both with Oxford University Press. In tackling the latter project, she undertook an extensive investigation of Roman spectacle and punishment, for which much of the evidence survives in inscriptions and artefacts, rather than in literary sources. The result has been a long series of articles on various aspects of the culture and mentality that fueled the displays of the Roman amphitheatre. The combination of literature, epigraphy, and material culture has become a major focus of her research, leading her to such diverse topics as the ancient schoolroom, Roman mosaics, and the gardens of the Mediterranean world. She has also published articles on sociolinguistic features of Latin texts - specifically on parenthetical remarks in poems composed by Statius to honor his patrons and on bureaucratic language in official correspondence between the younger Pliny and the emperor Trajan - and she has published several studies of classical resonances in the work of the twentieth-century South African poet, Douglas Livingstone. She has delivered lectures on five continents, including the Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor (2010), and memorial lectures in honor of Sir Ronald Syme in Wellington, New Zealand (2008) and Oxford (2018). She has held fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung (1987-88, 1992), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2013-14), and the Institute for Advanced Study (2017-18). In 2012 she was elected a Corresponding Member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften and in 2020 a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. In 2011 she served as the President of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies) and in 2020 she was elected President of the Internationale Thesaurus-Kommission, the international committee that oversees the publication of the Thesaurus linguae Latinae, which was begun in 1894 and comprises the most comprehensive lexicon of the Latin language ever undertaken. At Harvard, she has received multiple awards for teaching and mentoring: a Harvard College Professorship (2003-08); the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize for Senior Faculty, awarded by the Undergraduate Council (2005); the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching (2019); and the Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award from the Graduate Student Council (2020). Her greatest ambition is to visit every Roman province.
 
Election Year
2021[X]