Deborah Kamen (she/her/hers)

I am broadly interested in Greek cultural and social history, with a particular focus on slavery, gender, and sexuality.

My first book, Status in Classical Athens (Princeton University Press, 2013), maps a spectrum of ten social and legal statuses in classical Athens, questioning the ideology of three neatly defined status groups—slave, metic (resident foreigner), and citizen—so commonly found in both ancient Greek literature and modern classical scholarship. In my second book, Insults in Classical Athens (University of Wisconsin Press, 2020), I examine the range of insults in Athens from benign mockery to serious affronts. My third book, Greek Slavery (De Gruyter, 2023), surveys recent scholarly trends and controversies in the field of Greek slavery studies and suggests future directions for research.

I have also written commentaries on Isaeus' Orations 2 and 6 (Bryn Mawr Commentaries 2000) and Pseudo-Demosthenes' Against Neaira (Dickinson Classical Commentaries, online 2018; print book 2021) and co-edited (with C. W. Marshall) a volume entitled Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity (University of Wisconsin Press, 2021).

For many years I served as co-chair of the Lambda Classical Caucus, a coalition of LGBTQ Classicists and their allies affiliated with the Society for Classical Studies.