Maud Gleason

Maud Gleason

Adjunct Lecturer

Maud Gleason studies the cultural and social world of Greeks in the Roman Empire, with a particular interest in issues of gender, religion, self-performance, and power. She is the author of Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (Princeton 1995; paperback 2008). She has recently published a study of Galen's public anatomical displays, and another on the cultural identity of the Roman Empire's best-documented private citizen, the Athenian millionaire Herodes Atticus, who married a Roman patrician. She admits a weakness for entertaining narratives, and enjoys trying to wrest from them deeper cultural meanings. Her essay, "Identity Theft: Doubles and Masquerades in Cassius Dio's Contemporary History," Classical Antiquity 30. 1, is now available at University of California Press

Current Projects: 
Her current book project, a development of her 2008 Jerome lectures, treats the history and mythology of an imaginary disease thought to reduce the sufferer to a subhuman state. The pharmacology and mythology of its cure suggests a second-century CE fascination with transformation of the flesh.

She no longer teaches or advises students.

Research Interest(s)
Research Subfields
Greek Language
Greek Literature