Dr Katherine Backler
I am a social historian of the Ancient Greek world, focusing on the Archaic and Classical periods. I work at the University of Leeds as a Lecturer in Ancient History and am a Fifty-Pound Fellow at All Souls. My research has two related strands. First, I recover the perspectives and experiences of ancient women and other marginalised groups, and reconsider how we might access these perspectives. Second, I work outwards from the study of self-articulation and interpersonal relationships to re-examine wider cultural phenomena and social structures. I’m currently working towards a better understanding of the historical and cultural dynamics of authorship of ancient Greek inscriptions, with the aim of establishing a corpus of ‘women’s inscriptions’ through which to approach the early Greek world from the perspective of its women. Alongside this, I’ve recently been working on the speeches of the early-fourth-century speechwriter Lysias and what they tell us about the social, cultural, and political history of the contexts in which they were written and delivered.
Selected Publications
Hammond, M., and Backler, K. (forthcoming), (Oxford University Press: Oxford).
Backler, K., in Lazar, L., and Thonemann, P., eds., Allan, W., and Plastow, C., eds., Athenian Revolutions 412-403 BC: The Oligarchies in Context (Edinburgh University Press: Edinburgh).
Backler, K. (forthcoming), in Allan, W., and Plastow, C., eds., A Handbook of Theory and Practice in Greek Oratory (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge).