Sharon L. James received her doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, with a dissertation on parents and children in Homer, Vergil, and Dante. She is professor of Classics and an adjunct member of both the Comparative Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies departments at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Her areas of scholarly specialization are Latin poetry; women and gender in antiquity, particularly women in Rome; New Comedy; and Italian epic. Her book, Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy (University of California Press, 2003) examines the arguments of Roman elegy from the perspective of its preferred love object, the docta puella. She is co-editor of A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, with Sheila Dillon of Duke University; Women in the Classical World, also with Professor Dillon, a four-volume collection of reprinted essays in the Routledge Press’s Major Works series (forthcoming in 2017); and Women in Republican Roman Drama, with Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan, published in Spring 2015 by the University of Wisconsin Press.
In summer 2012, Professor James co-directed, with Professor Timothy Moore (Washington University in St. Louis; UNC Classics PhD., 1986), an NEH Summer Institute entitled "Roman Comedy in Performance." Participants (faculty and graduate students in Classics, Theater, Religious Studies, and History) produced twenty performed scenes from Roman Comedy, six of them in Latin. The videos have been viewed more than 22,500 times, in 126 countries (as of October 2016). The performances can be seen here.
