Dr Emily Hauser

I read Classics at the University of Cambridge, where I graduated with a double first with distinction and was awarded the University of Cambridge Chancellor’s Medal for Classical Proficiency. I studied at Harvard University as a Fulbright Scholar, and received my PhD in Classics from Yale University in 2017. From 2017–2018 I was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. My research focuses on women in antiquity, gender studies, Homer, and the theory and practice of classical reception, particularly in contemporary women’s writing. My first monograph, How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature (2023, Princeton University Press), explores how the idea of the author in Greek literature was born in the battleground of gender; it was a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year and was shortlisted for the Seminary Co-Op’s Best Books of 2023. I have co-edited three volumes, Women Creating Classics: A Retrospective (2025, Bloomsbury), Women Re-Creating Classics: Contemporary Voices (2025, Bloomsbury), and Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship (2018, Bloomsbury); and I am also the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels reworking the women of Greek myth, including For the Most Beautiful (2016, Penguin Random House), For the Winner (2017, PRH) and For the Immortal (2018, PRH). I have featured on BBC Radio 4 Woman's Hour, BBC Radio 5 Live, The Observer and The Guardian alongside Colm Tóibín and Natalie Haynes, and in global radio programmes from ABC (Australia) to KPFA (USA). My latest book, Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out Of It, came out with Transworld (Penguin Random House) in April 2025. It was an instant Times bestseller and was named as one of Waterstones' Best Books of 2025.