Kathy Hannah Eden

Kathy Eden, Chavkin Family Professor of English and Professor of Classics, began teaching at Columbia in 1980 after receiving her PhD in Comparative Literature from Stanford University. Her fields of study include Renaissance Humanism, the History of Rhetoric, and the Classical Tradition. She is the author of Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition (Princeton University Press, 1986; pbk 2014), Hermeneutics and the Rhetorical Tradition: Chapters in the Ancient Legacy and Its Humanist Reception (Yale University Press, 1997; pbk 2002), Friends Hold All Things in Common: Tradition, Intellectual Property and the “Adages” of Erasmus (Yale University Press, 2001; winner Roland Bainton Award for Literature), and The Renaissance Rediscovery of Intimacy (University of Chicago Press, 2012; pbk 2017).

She has received fellowships from the Center for Hellenic Studies, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, All Souls, Oxford, and the Peter Szondi Institute, Freie Universitaet, Berlin. Her teaching awards from Columbia include the Great Teachers’ Award from the Society of Columbia Graduates, the Mark Van Doren Award, and the Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching. She is currently working on a book-length manuscript entitled “Rhetorical Renaissance: the Master Art and Its Literary Legacy.”