Susan Deacy


Susan Deacy is a classical scholar who has been Professor of Classics at the University of Roehampton since January 2018. She researches the history and literature of the ancient Greek world, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality, ancient Greek mythology and religion, and disability studies. She is also an expert on the teaching of subjects which are potentially sensitive, including sexual violence, domestic violence, and infanticide; she was project leader on the initiative 'Teaching Sensitive Subjects in the Classics Classroom'. She is also series editor of Routledge's Gods and Heroes of the Ancient World, and has been editor of the Bulletin of the Council of University Classical Departments since 2011.

Career

Susan Deacy was educated at the University of Wales, where she took a Bachelor of Arts in Classical Studies and Theology in 1991 and a PhD in Classics in 2000. She has held teaching posts at the Universities of Wales, Keele, Leeds and Manchester. In 2005 she left the University of Manchester to become Lecturer in Greek History and Literature at the University of Roehampton. She held the Käthe-Leichter visiting professorship for gender studies at the University of Vienna in 2010/11, where she gave the Käthe-Leichter Lecture on 'A traitor to her sex? Athena the trickster'. Deacy became a National Teaching Fellow of the Higher Education Academy in 2015 and was promoted to Professor in January 2018.
She is a team member on the 'Our Mythical Childhood' project, which is based in Warsaw and funded by the European Research Council; it examines classical reception in children's and young adults' culture. In relation to this she also researches the autistic connection and reception of myth.

Selected publications