Shadi Bartsch (born March 17, 1966) is an American academic and is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. She has previously held professorships at the University of California, Berkeley and Brown University where she was the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics in 2008-2009. From 2015 to 2024 she was the Director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge (IFK) at the University of Chicago.

Life

Bartsch, the daughter of a UN economist and a distant descendant of Persia's Qajar dynasty, spent her childhood in London, Geneva (where she studied at the International School of Geneva), Tehran, Jakarta, and the Fiji Islands. She earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1987 and a Ph.D. (1992) from the University of California, Berkeley in Classics. She was married to University of Chicago president and mathematician Robert Zimmer from 2011 until his death in 2023.

Career

Bartsch's contributions have been to classical scholarship in the areas of the literature and culture of Julio-Claudian Rome, the ancient novel, Roman stoicism, and the classical tradition. More recently, Bartsch has branched out into the effect of the ancient world on our modern one, especially in Plato Goes to China: The Ancient Greeks and Chinese Nationalism. Bartsch is also the author of an acclaimed translation of Vergil's "Aeneid." She was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College in 2000 and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2006 at the University of Chicago. She won an ACLS Fellowship in 1999 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007. She served as chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Chicago Press from 2006 to 2008 and editor-in-chief of both Classical Philology and KNOW. She was appointed the inaugural director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge. In July 2024 Bartsch was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. She is the founding member of the interdisciplinary group FIR.

Books or Edited Volumes