Rachel Lesser

Associate Professor (Ancient Greek & Roman Studies)

Ancient Greek & Roman Studies

rlesser@gettysburg.edu

Phone

717-337-6560

Campus Box

0394

Address

Weidensall Hall
Room 201

Professor Lesser teaches courses in Greek and Latin language and literature, Greek history, and gender and sexuality in ancient Greece. Her primary research interests are in Greek poetry and culture, and she uses a variety of modern critical theories and approaches in her work. She focuses particularly on desire, gender, and narrative in early Greek poetry, and her first book, Desire in the Iliad: The Force That Moves the Epic and Its Audience, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. She is also interested in the modern reception of the classics, and recently published an article on the representation of the enslaved woman Briseis in the Iliad, Ovid's Heroides 3, Pat Barker's The Silence of the Girls (2018) and Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles (2011). She is currently working on a second book project that investigates the epic tradition using queer theories of temporality, tentatively titled Queer and Straight Trajectories in the Trojan War Epic Tradition.

Education

BA, Columbia University, 2006BA, Magdalen College, Oxford University, 2008MA, University of California, Berkeley, 2009PhD, University of California, Berkeley, 2015

Academic Focus

Homer, Greek and Latin poetry, gender and sexuality studies, critical theory

Publications

Book Chapter

Lesser, Rachel H. 2026. “Gender in the Odyssey: Significance and Ideology.” In Approaches to Teaching the Odyssey, edited by Lillian Doherty, 111–123. Modern Language Association.

Book Chapter

Lesser, Rachel H. 2025. “Book 17.” In the Oxford Critical Guide to Homer’s Odyssey, edited by Joel P. Christensen, 217–230. Oxford University Press.

Article