Departmental homepageProfessor Gowers was a student and Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. Her first book was The Loaded Table: Representations of Food in Roman Literature (Oxford University Press, 1993). She taught at UCL, Princeton and Stanford, before returning to a lectureship in Cambridge in 2002. She became Professor of Latin Literature in 2016. In 2022 she was the Sather Professor at University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Gowers teaches Latin literature for all parts of the Classical Tripos. She lectures on Horace's Odes (for Part II) and runs a postgraduate seminar on Statius's Silvae.
Her research focuses on Latin literature from Plautus to Apuleius and its reception; satire; the natural world (especially trees); material objects; food; and poetics. Her latest book is a cultural biography of the Roman patron Maecenas and her next book is on small things that mattered to the Romans.
Horace, Satires I, Cambridge University Press, 2012
Rome's Patron: The Lives and Afterlives of Maecenas, Princeton University Press, 2024
The Small Stuff of Roman Antiquity, University of California Press, 2025
