About

Helen Morales is the James and Sarah Argyropoulos Professor in Hellenic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is a classicist and cultural critic with a wide range of interests in the ancient world, including the ancient novel, Greek imperial poetry, mythology, literary criticism, sexual ethics, diversity, and pilgrimage. Her work consistently connects these interests to contemporary issues such as leadership, class, race, sexual politics, aesthetics, and law, emphasizing the importance of understanding classical antiquity to better grasp these modern concerns. Morales has authored several books, including 'Pilgrimage to Dollywood' and 'Antigone Rising,' and has edited numerous volumes on topics related to Greek and Roman literature and culture. She received her PhD from the University of Cambridge and has taught at various institutions, including the University of Reading, Arizona State University, and Cambridge, where she was a Fellow of Newnham College. In 2025, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University. Morales is actively involved in public engagement, theater consultancy, radio work, and organizing events that promote Greek culture. She has held leadership roles within the UCSB Classics Department, including Graduate Advisor and Chair, and currently serves as an Associate Dean of the Humanities and Fine Arts. She founded and co-directs the Center for Ancient Fiction at UCSB and serves on the Professional Ethics Committee of the Society for Classical Studies. Her research and editorial work focus on Greek and Roman literature, mythology, and their intersections with modern issues, making her a prominent figure in her field.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Art
• Mechanical engineering
• Mathematics
• Engineering
• Library science
• Archaeology
• Art history
• Literature
• History
• World Wide Web
• Physics
• Philosophy
• Thermodynamics
• Environmental science

Selected publications

• INTRODUCTION: IPHIGENIA IN THE BLACK FANTASTIC

  Ramus · 2023-06-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

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• A network analysis of a metropolitan affordable housing network: lessons for policy guidance from the City of Los Angeles

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2023-09-19

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Examining how the City of Los Angeles has responded to the affordable housing crisis, this study aimed to provide policymakers with a network perspective of the City’s affordable housing strategy and how network members can work to affect the overarching goal of affordable housing. The chapter highlights how local, state and federal actors influence the programmatic levels. Findings indicate that while 70% of network members reported working with other network members, very little social bonding is evident and social capital has not been established. Network members do not share common educational foundations and disagree on future goal attainment potential. Because of these findings, City Administration can be more effective if it ensures that social capital is garnered through establishing long-term relationships, trust, face-to-face interactions among its members, and norms of reciprocity to develop cooperative agreements and informal networks and ultimately establish a modern network.

  PublisherDOI

• RMU volume 52 issue 2 Cover and Front matter

  Ramus · 2023-12-01

  articleOpen access
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• GENERAL EDITORIAL: THE LAST <i>RAMUS</i>

  Ramus · 2023-12-01

  articleSenior author

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• Bonnie Honig’s <i>A Feminist Theory of Refusal</i> with Kehinde Wiley’s <i>After John Raphael Smith’s “A Bacchante (after Sir Joshua Reynolds)”</i>

  Classical Antiquity · 2022 · 18 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Art history

  Bonnie Honig invites us to look at concepts

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Visualizing Assemblages

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2022 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Literature
  • Art
  • History

  This chapter discusses Book 1, chapters 15–17, of Heliodorus’ <italic>Ethiopian Tales</italic>, an episode within a story told by the young Athenian Cnemon to Theagenes and Charicleia. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first analyses the incestuous desire of the character Demaenete for her stepson, Cnemon. The second explores the nature and function of the ‘bed-trick’, a literary trope familiar from <italic>Measure for Measure</italic> in which one character is substituted for another, in order to deceive someone into sleeping with them. In this novel, Demaenete’s slave, Thisbe, arranges for Demaenete to take the place of Cnemon’s lover, and (almost) trick him into sleeping with his stepmother. The third section discusses characterization in the novel, focusing upon Charicleia and Thisbe (who have often been read as antitheses to one another). I argue that the dynamics of characterization, and the attendant sexual politics, are more complicated than a simple opposition. Drawing on assemblage theory (first outlined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari), this chapter advances a reading of Charicleia as an assemblage of female figures whose visibility is established in Roman society: the prostitute, the priestess, and the martyr. Charicleia is created as a <italic>visualizing assemblage</italic> of these female roles, in the sense that the component parts of the assemblage make her character visible. Heliodorus, the chapter argues, portrays Charicleia through, and at times as, these female figures in the public gaze, with shifting intensities and moral affects, and thereby creates a new model of womanhood: the elite and upright betrothed woman whose visibility is socially sanctioned. In this reading, Thisbe functions not as the antithesis of Charicleia’s character, but as a constituent component of it.

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• Index

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021-05-27

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• Reception in the Greco-Roman World

  2021-06-01

  article
  Publisher

• RMU volume 49 issue 1-2 Cover and Front matter

  Ramus · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Environmental science
  • Computer Science

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• Greek

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2020-02-05

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article offers an overview of Greek literature of the Roman Empire. The first section discusses ways in which Greek writing responds to Roman rule. This section ranges widely and takes snapshots from six writers—Artemidorus, Plutarch, Lucian, Basil of Caesarea, Galen, and Josephus—from which to show the complexities involved in thinking about Greek literature and its attendant critical issues, including how we might read ‘resistance’ and how Hellenisms relate to Christianities, and Jewish and other identities. The second section focuses more closely on Greek poetry and pantomime, and the third section on the romance novels and Greek prose fiction, including a brief look at a couple of texts that possibly show Egyptian influences.

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Frequent coauthors

• A Boyle

  Brigham Young University

  85 shared

• J Penwill

  52 shared

• Sara Lindheim

  17 shared

• Christopher Trinacty

  Oberlin College

  16 shared

• C. Michael Sampson

  16 shared

• Simon Goldhill

  9 shared

• Tim Whitmarsh

  7 shared

• Froma I. Zeitlin

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Academic Senate Outstanding Mentor Award (2023-24)
• Gail A. Burnett Lecturer at San Diego State University (2011…
• John C. Rouman Classical Lecture at the University of New Ha…
• Charles Beebe Martin Memorial Lectures at Oberlin College (2…
• J. H. Gray Lectures at the University of Cambridge (2025)