Kathleen M. Coleman is an academic and writer who is the James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University. Her research interests include Latin literature, history and culture in the early Roman Empire, and arena spectacles. Her expertise in the latter area led to her appointment as Chief Academic Consultant for the 2000 film Gladiator.

Career

Coleman was born and raised in Southern Rhodesia, which later was renamed Zimbabwe. She received her BA from the University of Cape Town in 1973, followed by a BA Hons from the University of Rhodesia in 1975 and a DPhil from Oxford in 1979. She taught at the University of Cape Town from 1979 to 1993 and held the chair of Latin at Trinity College, Dublin from 1993 to 1998. Since 1998 she has been a professor at Harvard College. In 2009 Coleman was elected an Honorary Member of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies and in 2012 a Corresponding Member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities). Coleman has been a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin and the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung. In 2005 she was awarded the Joseph R. Levenson Teaching Prize for Senior Faculty by the Undergraduate Council of Harvard College, and in 2011 she served as president of the American Philological Association (now the Society for Classical Studies). Coleman is a member of the editorial boards of The American Journal of Philology, Eirene, Exemplaria Classica, Mnemosyne and Mnemosyne Supplements, and Rivista di Filologia e Istruzione Classica. Due to her extensive knowledge of gladiatorial combat and its history, she acted as Chief Academic Consultant on the script of Ridley Scott's Gladiator. Professor Coleman purportedly found her work as a historical consultant to have had such little effect that she asked to be listed in the credits without any mention of her function. She has since contributed an essay entitled "The Pedant Goes to Hollywood: The Role of the Academic Consultant" to Martin Winkler's collection of essays on the topic. She was elected as a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy in 2020. In 2021 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society. She served as Professor-in-Charge for the Intercollegiate Center of Classical Studies (ICCS) for Fall 2021 and Spring 2022.

Selected publications

Books

Book chapters and journal articles