Amy Barbour: Biography as Scholarly Self-Fashioning

Amy Barbour (PhD Yale, 1902) was one of the first women to receive a PhD in Classics in the United States. This essay describes how Barbour’s social context, gender, and national identity inflected her engagement with transatlantic intellectual trends. A biographical sketch culminating with Barbour’s career at Smith College as Professor of Ancient Greek is followed by a description of her academic achievements in the light of contemporary disciplinary anxiety and the use of biography as a scholarly tool. This two-pronged approach complements the valuable body of scholarship on North American women Classicists, which has focused more on those women’s life-stories than their research. Some thoughts are offered on contemporary applications of biography in the study of classical scholarship, including this one.