About

Catherine M. Connors is the Daniel P. Harmon Professor of Classics at the University of Washington, where she also holds an adjunct position in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies. She earned her Ph.D. from Michigan in 1989, her M.A. from Michigan in 1986, and her B.A. from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1984. Her research interests include the representation of nature and geography in Greek and Roman literature, feminism and feminist theory, gender, women, and sexuality studies, language pedagogy, Latin and Greek literature and culture, Latin literature, Latin pedagogy and outreach, and the reception of novel/prose fiction. She has a particular focus on the study of women in Greek and Roman antiquity and the adaptation and transformation of classical texts, especially the Greek and Roman novel. Connors has explored how women interacted with classical Greek and Roman texts during periods when women were generally excluded from formal study of the classics. She has also worked closely with students pursuing careers in K-12 teaching and maintains an active interest in outreach projects promoting classical subjects in education. Her recent projects include developing teaching materials for Latin in elementary classrooms, coordinating Latin courses at UW, facilitating Latin courses at middle and high school levels, and collaborating with teachers on strategies for teaching classical literature in translation. Connors has received numerous awards, including the Distinguished Teaching Award from the University of Washington in 2016, and has published extensively on topics related to classical literature, gender, and cultural history.

Research topics

• History
• Art
• Literature
• Philosophy
• Classics

Selected publications

• Tratamiento de los cálculos coraliformes

  EMC - Urología · 2025-08-12

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  PublisherDOI

• Effects of a Virtually Delivered Activity Promotion Program on Lung Function in Individuals with Spinal Cord Injury – A Retrospective Study

  Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation · 2025-04-01

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  PublisherDOI

• Endless Pleasure: Congreve’s Semele and her Classical Past

  2024-10-21

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Feminist Abolitionist reads Plutarch, Euripides, and Plato: Periclean Athens and Nineteenth Century America in Lydia Maria Child’s Philothea (1836)

  Eugesta · 2024-01-15

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  In writing her 1836 novel Philothea, the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child drew on careful reading of Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, Euripides’ Ion, and Plato’s Republic. The novel’s plot, organized around Pericles’ law that both parents must be Athenian citizens for their child to have citizenship, shares features with arguments for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights that Child made in other writings throughout her lifetime. Child combined a sentimental romance narrative about an enslaved woman that encourages readers to become abolitionists with allusions to Plato’s Republic that affirm the abolitionist conviction that slavery is absolutely unjust. Previous scholarship has treated Child’s use of Greek material in a rather general way. This article demonstrates just how precisely she incorporated elements of Plutarch, Euripides and Plato into the abolitionist story she chose to tell. By expanding understanding of Child’s engagement with the classical past that her gender kept her from learning about in a university setting, this study also contributes to the growing body of knowledge about how women did get access to — and put to use — classical learning.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Myth, Geography, and Ethnography at the Strait of Messina

  Arion · 2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Myth, Geography, and Ethnography at the Strait of Messina Catherine Connors (bio) Marco Benoît Carbone, Geographies of Myth and Places of Identity: The Strait of Scylla and Charybdis in the Modern Imagination. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. xv + 256 pages, $115.00. At the end of Book 12 of the Odyssey, after the last of his men have been dispatched by Zeus to a watery grave for killing and eating the Cattle of the Sun, Odysseus clings perilously to a branch of a fig tree overhanging the abyss of the monstrous whirlpool Charybdis. As he had prepared to depart from Circe, she warned him he would need to pass between the cave-dwelling dog-woman Scylla and the whirlpool Charybdis, and that the only way to survive was to avoid the whirlpool and thus let Scylla snatch up six of his men, and so it transpired. Now, his return from the island of the Sun brings him again into their narrow strait. Pieces of his ship emerge from the whirlpool, he drops down onto them from the fig tree, is kept hidden by Zeus from Scylla, and floats away on his nine-day voyage to Calypso’s island. Since antiquity, inquiring minds have mapped Homeric narrative onto the real world. Mount Ida overlooks the Trojan plain. Ithaca, Pylos, Crete and Ethiopia are real places. Strabo understands Homer as a repository of geographical knowledge, observing that when Homer mentions several places, these are correctly organized in a spatial sense (1.2.20). The digital project Mapping the Catalogue of Ships (Clay, Evans, Jasnow, n.d.) graphically demonstrates the “spatial mnemonic” that organizes the display of geographical knowledge in the catalogue of Greeks ships assembling for the expedition against Troy. Sometimes the relation between poem and place is less straightforward: Pharos at the mouth of the Nile could arguably be recognized in Homer’s account of the [End Page 81] travels of Menelaus, once account was taken of shoreline changes since the composition of the epic (Strabo 1.2.30). It is harder to map the realms of the fantastic beings who populate Odysseus’ own tale about his wanderings: the Cyclops, Circe with her transformative powers, Aeolus and his bag of winds, the souls Odysseus speaks to at the entrance to the underworld, the Sirens, and Scylla and Charybdis. The earliest versions of these stories may have born the traces of explorations of Italy’s western shores during the Mycenaean period.1 When Greek colonists from Euboea began to settle in Italy’s west during the eighth century bce, they were perhaps already expecting to see what they had heard of in Homeric storytelling. Odysseus’ wanderings began to be more firmly attached to places, especially in areas of Greek colonization in Italy that came to be known as Magna Graecia.2 The name Scyllaion was mentioned by the early Greek geographer and historian Hecataeus as a “height” (FrgH 1 F82); Strabo (6.1.5) describes it as a high rocky isthmus near the narrow strait between Reggio Calabria and Messina in Sicily; it is now the town of Scilla. In describing the first Athenian expedition against Sicily, Thucydides identifies the strait between Rhegium (Reggio Calabria) and Messina as Charybdis. His remark that the narrow strait caused strong currents conveys the Syracusans’ view that the currents would thwart an Athenian attack and, in combination with Thucydides’ other references to Homeric geography, also “implies that it was the fascination exerted by stories that were localized in Sicily that made the Athenians desire to travel there themselves” (Thuc. 4.24 with Rood 2012, 154–5). Eratosthenes, trying to map the known world and its encircling Ocean with observation-based knowledge rather than mere stories, discounted altogether the idea that Odysseus’ wanderings contained authentic geographical information, writing that “someone would discover where Odysseus wandered only when he found the leather worker who stitched together Aeolus’ bag of winds” (Strabo 1.2.15). Polybius, by contrast, accepts Italian identifications of Homeric places, providing rationalizing accounts of Aeolus as a local man who helped sailors navigate the seas between Italy and Sicily, and Scylla as a story based on predatory swordfish that could be observed being caught...

  PublisherDOI

• Influencing Policy and Practice Through Social Science Research Evidence

  2023-10-10

  book-chapterOpen access

  In this chapter, we contribute to debates about how social science research can influence policy and practice. We draw upon our own experiences as social policy researchers whose work focuses on poverty and social security to provide case studies of our varied efforts to influence policy and practice at both local and national levels. We identify three main approaches that we have utilised across our research: working collaboratively with policy and practice stakeholders in the design and delivery of research; engaging with national policy and practice stakeholders during the lifetime of projects; and submitting research evidence to government consultations. Our approaches represent varying degrees of relationship building and ‘closeness’ with policy and practice stakeholders, which, in turn, impact on both the level of influence our work has achieved and our understanding of that influence. In this chapter, we provide some reflections and lessons learnt from across our work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Occupational and Physical Therapy Rehabilitation Strategies for COVID-19 Related Guillain-Barré Syndrome: A Case Report

  Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation · 2022-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Complex lives: exploring experiences of Universal Credit claimants in Salford during COVID-19

  Policy Press eBooks · 2022-05-31

  book-chapterOpen access

  Background: Many young people with autism can have an average or above average IQ, yet they still struggle with the social competencies needed to successfully navigate into adulthood.Despite many individuals with autism experiencing significant challenges during their transition into adulthood, evidence-based therapeutic interventions to support individuals with autism during this transition are limited.The current literature suggests that cognitive behavioural therapy interventions can help improve social skills and the mental health of individuals with autism.However, little is known about the benefits for young adults with autism transitioning or who have transitioned into adulthood.Aims and Method: The aim of this research was to deliver a newly developed Cognitive Behavioural Social Competence Therapeutic Intervention for Adults with Autism (CBSCTI-A) to five young adults with autism.Research aims were to evaluate intervention feasibility and efficacy by triangulating data findings using a mixed methods approach.Results: Results support feasibility, with CBSCTI-A receiving very high user satisfaction ratings, and adherence to the intervention was high, recorded at ~90%.Fidelity to treatment was also high, ranging from ~86% to ~100%.Quantitative findings indicate that over an eight-week time period, a small sample of young adults with autism experienced significant improvements with regard to their social motivation, non-verbal conversation, emotional empathy, assertiveness, interpersonal relationships and selfcontrol.Qualitative findings provide further anecdotal support for intervention feasibility and efficacy.After the completion of the intervention, participants and their parents were invited to complete semistructured interviews.Thematic analysis (TA) revealed four main themes: user satisfaction, important components of therapeutic intervention, challenges and critiques, and recommendations. Conclusions:CBSCTI-A appears to be a feasible intervention; however, future research with larger samples and more rigorous controlled trials is needed before efficacy can be established.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Complex lives:

  Policy Press eBooks · 2022-05-31 · 1 citations

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  PublisherDOI

• Complex lives: exploring experiences of Universal Credit claimants in Salford during COVID-19

  Policy Press eBooks · 2022-05-06

  book-chapterOpen access

  Exploring Universal Credit (UC) in Salford is a qualitative longitudinal project delivered by the Salford Anti-Poverty Taskforce; a research and knowledge exchange partnership between the University of Salford and Salford City Council. The project began in 2019 and aimed to provide an understanding of experiences of UC in Salford, from the perspective of Salford residents who are claiming UC and also those organisations who are supporting benefit claimants across the City. Drawing upon in-depth interviews undertaken both prior to and during COVID-19, this chapter illustrates change and continuity across an array of complex needs and circumstances facing the participants, including significant health issues, caring responsibilities, housing insecurity, domestic abuse, and financial insecurity. Ultimately what appeared to dominate the narratives were the challenges of life on a low income while managing a range of complex circumstances.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Tim Whitmarsh

  5 shared

• Lisa Scullion

  University of Salford

  4 shared

• Andrea Gibbons

  Millennium Engineering and Integration (United States)

  4 shared

• Dave Beck

  American Foundry Society

  3 shared

• Joe Pardoe

  University of Salford

  3 shared

• Cindy Clendenon

  2 shared

• Katy Jones

  Manchester Metropolitan University

  1 shared

• Philip A. Martin

  Basque Centre for Climate Change

  1 shared

Labs

• Catherine M. Connors LabPI

Awards & honors

• Distinguished Teaching Award, University of Washington, 2016
• UW University of Ljubljana Scholars Exchange 2025