Katherine Harloe

Katherine Harloe FHEA, FRHistS, is Professor of Classics at the University of Reading. She is an expert on the history of classical scholarship, the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the eighteenth-century German classicist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann.

Harloe received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge in 2004. Her doctoral thesis was entitled 'Franz Neumann, the Rule of Law and the Unfulfilled Promise of Classical Liberal Thought'.

After completing her doctoral studies, Harloe held postdoctoral research fellowships at the University of Oxford (St Anne's College) and the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol. She joined the University of Reading in 2007 and was made Professor in 2019.

Harloe's principal areas of research include the reception of classical antiquity in Europe from 1750 the present, eighteenth-century neoclassical aesthetics, the history of Homeric scholarship, and the scholarship of classical myth. Harloe is a world-leading expert on Winckelmann. She published the monograph Winckelmann and the invention of antiquity: History and aesthetics in the age of Altertumswissenschaftin (Oxford University Press) in 2013. The work was described as 'learned, fascinating and well-written'. She received a Mid-Career Fellowship from the British Academy to study Winckelmann's homoerotic love letters and their reception in the nineteenth century. She is a committee member of the International Winckelmann Committee and of the International Committee of the Winckelmann-Gesellschaft.

Harloe is a co-editor of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. She was a founding co-chair of the Women's Classical Committee (UK) 2015-17 and serves on the Steering Committee.