Louise PrattProfessor of Classics

After receiving a B.A. in Classics and History of Ideas from Williams College and a Ph.D. in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan, Louise Pratt taught for a year at Bowdoin College as a visiting assistant professor before coming to Emory in 1989. She has served several times as department chair, in 1995-96, 2005-2009 and 2013-2016, and has won several teaching awards including the Classical Association of the Midwest and South's Award for Excellence in College Teaching in 2003, the Emory College Language Center Award for Excellence in Language Teaching in 2010, and the Emory Williams Distinguished Teaching Award in 2012.

Her teaching and research interests include Homer, Greek tragedy, and Plato. Her first book, Lying and Poetry from Homer to Pindar: Falsehood and Deception in Archaic Greek Poetics (Michigan, 1997), examines the way archaic Greek poetry plays with the fictional and seductive qualities of literature by connecting it to liars and tricksters. Her most recent major publication is a Festschrift in honor of Professor Ruth Scodel, co-edited with C. Michael Sampson, Engaging Classical Texts in the Contemporary World: From Narratology to Reception (Michigan, 2018). She is currently working on a book on representations of children in Greek literature. Her articles on children and childhood have appeared in Constructions of Childhood in Ancient Greece and Italy, Hesperia suppl. 41 (2007), Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Engaging Classical Texts in the Contemporary World (Michigan, 2018).

She has also published two textbooks, The Essentials of Greek Grammar: A Reference for Intermediate Readers of Ancient Greek and Eros at the Banquet: Reviewing Greek with Plato's Symposium (Oklahoma, 2010, 2011) and is working on a third on Aeschylus' Agamemnon. She has taught all levels of Classics, Greek, and Latin courses at Emory from freshman seminars on

"The Iliad, the Odyssey, and their Influence" and "Ancient Medicine: Healing and Hurting from Cheiron to Galen" to advanced Greek courses on Aeschylus' Agamemnon, Presocratic philosophy, "Dionysus in Drama," and "Love and War in Archaic Greek Poetry."