Catharine Edwards

Catharine Harmon Edwards (born May 1963) is a British ancient historian and academic. She is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is a specialist in Roman cultural history and Latin prose literature, particularly Seneca the Younger.

Edwards studied at the University of Cambridge for both her BA and her PhD.

Edwards has been Professor of Classics and Ancient History at Birkbeck College, University of London, since 2006. Before joining Birkbeck in 2001, she was a reader at the University of Bristol.

Edwards researches Roman cultural history and Latin prose literature, particularly the Younger Seneca. She also researches the reception of Classical antiquity in later periods.

Edwards is the presenter of the three-part BBC series Mothers, Murderers and Mistresses: Empresses of Ancient Rome. She has also contributed to BBC Radio 4's In our time series, on Cleopatra, Roman Britain, Virgil's Aeneid, Tacitus and the decadence of Rome, Pliny the Younger, and The Augustan Age.

She has served as president of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies from June 2015 to June 2018.

• The politics of immorality in ancient Rome. Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Writing Rome: Textual Approaches to the City. Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Rome the Cosmopolis. Cambridge University Press, 2003. (edited with Greg Woolf).
• Death in ancient Rome. Yale University Press, 2007.