Classics Ph.D. candidate Laura Harris has won a coveted Dean’s Medal, an honor granted to only four exemplary graduate students across UW Arts & Sciences each year. This award recognizes Harris’s key role in inaugurating the study of asexuality studies in antiquity as well as her leadership and mentorship in interdisciplinary conversations on gender and sexuality trans-historically.
Harris’s dissertation, Virginitate frui: Charting Asexuality in Latin Poetry, focuses on key examples of characters in Roman literature who are “asexually resonant,” and her first article (forthcoming in Early Modern Asexualities; Cornell UP) moves between Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its Elizabethan translation by Golding. This work shows the deep roots of gender and sexual identities that exist outside societal norms, revealing a common set of social-cultural and political tactics to dismiss such identities as well as surprising ways in which asexuality could be accepted. This research not only offers an entirely new paradigm for Roman sexuality that will continue to reverberate and produce new work for years, but also is key to supporting currently marginalized communities.
Next year Harris will continue working on Virginitate frui: Charting Asexuality in Latin Poetry as a prestigious Crake Fellow at Mount Allison University in New Brunswick (Canada).