Harriet Fertik's research focuses on literature and political thought in the early Roman empire and on classical reception. Her first book, The Ruler’s House: Contesting Power and Privacy in Julio-Claudian Rome (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) explored how Romans used the world of the house to interpret and interrogate the role of the emperor. She co-edited (with Mathias Hanses) Above the Veil: Revisiting the Classicism of W. E. B. Du Bois, a special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition (2019).  Her recent publications include "Women’s Work: Exploring a Tradition of Inquiry with W. E. B. Du Bois, Anna Julia Cooper, and Aristotle” (in The Routledge Handbook of Women and Ancient Greek Philosophy 2024), "Antiquity, Tradition, and Anti-Blackness in Hannah Arendt’s Public Sphere" (TAPA 2024), and "W. E. B. Du Bois's Universal History in Black Folk Then and Now (1939)" (Classical Receptions Journal 2024). Her current book project, Between Traditions: W. E. B. Du Bois, Hannah Arendt, and the Memory of Antiquity (under contract with Yale University Press) examines the complex triangulation between Black Americans, German Jews, and Greco-Roman antiquity through Du Bois’s and Arendt’s writing and the powerful but ambivalent relationship they each had with the classics. She is also developing a project on the role of women, especially mothers and nurses, in Roman thought on language and literature and a study of depictions of Jews in the city of Rome in Latin literature after 70 CE. 
 

Fertik is one of the founding members of Eos, a society dedicated to Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome, and serves on its executive committee. She co-leads the "Metaphors of Reception, Reception as a Metaphor" working group at the Humanities Institute at Ohio State. She was previously an associate professor of Classics at the University of New Hampshire and held an Alexander von Humboldt research fellowship at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Fertik CV (online) 2026