Cornelia Catlin Coulter

Cornelia Catlin Coulter (1885 – 27 April 1960) was an American classicist and academic who was professor of Latin at Mount Holyoke College from 1926 to 1951. She is known in particular for her work on the Medieval and Renaissance use of Classical sources and for her presidency of and advocacy for the Classical Association of New England.

Career Coulter was born in 1885 in Ferguson, Missouri and was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, the Rev. Joseph Hill Coulter.

Coulter gained her BA from Washington University in St. Louis in 1907 and her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College in 1911. From 1909 to 1910, Coulter spent a year studying at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

After her PhD, Coulter became Reader of Latin at Bryn Mawr College. From 1912 to 1914 she taught Latin and Greek at Saint Agnes School in New York. Coulter became Associate Professor of Latin and Greek at Vassar College in 1916 and moved to Mount Holyoke College in 1926, where she remained till her retirement in 1951. In 1927, Coulter became a member of the American Association of University Professors. At Mount Holyoke College, Coulter was a professor of Latin and chairman of the department from 1935 to 1948.

After her retirement from Mount Holyoke College, Coulter taught for two years at Hiram College from 1951 to 1953 as a visiting professor for the John Hay Whitney Foundation. Following this, Coulter returned to brief periods of teaching at Mount Holyoke College for a semester in 1957 and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1959.

Coulter served as president of the Classical Association of New England, the American Philological Association, and the Western Massachusetts Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.

Selected publications 'Statius, Silvae, V, 4 and Fiammetta's Prayer to Sleep' in The American Journal of Philology Vol. 80, No. 4 (1959), pp. 390–395 'Boccaccio's Knowledge of Quintilian' in Speculum Vol. 33, No. 4 (Oct., 1958), pp. 490–496 'Pollio's History of the Civil War' in The Classical Weekly Vol. 46, No. 3 (Dec. 1, 1952), pp. 33–36 'The Transfiguration of the Sibyl' in The Classical Journal Vol. 46, No. 3 (Dec., 1950), pp. 121–126 'Boccaccio and the Cassinese Manuscripts of the Laurentian Library' in Classical Philology Vol. 43, No. 4 (Oct., 1948), pp. 217–230 'The Library of the Angevin Kings at Naples' in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association Vol. 75 (1944), pp. 141–155 'Marcus Junius Brutus and the "Brutus" of Accius' in The Classical Journal Vol. 35, No. 8 (May, 1940), pp. 460–470 'Further Notes on the Ritual of the Bithynian Christians' in Classical Philology Vol. 35, No. 1 (Jan., 1940), pp. 60–63 'Boccaccio's Archaeological Knowledge' in American Journal of Archaeology Vol. 41, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1937), pp. 397–405 'Aeolian Strains on the Roman Lyre' in The Classical Journal Vol. 31, No. 3 (Dec., 1935), pp. 175–182 'Boccaccio's Acquaintance with Homer' in Philological Quarterly (January 1926) 'The Happy Otherworld and Fairy Mistress Themes in the Odyssey' in Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association Vol. 56 (1925), pp. 37–53 'Latin Hymns of the Middle Ages' in Studies in Philology Vol. 21, No. 4 (Oct., 1924), pp. 571–585 'The Genealogy of the Gods' in Vassar Medieval Studies (Yale University Press, 1923) pp. 336–40 'The Plautine Tradition in Shakespeare' in The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Vol. 19, No. 1 (Jan., 1920), pp. 66–83 Compound adjectives in early Latin poetry (Ginn & Company, Boston, 1916) Retractatio in the Ambrosian and Palatine Recensions of Plautus. A Study of the Persa, Poenulus, Pseudolus, Stichus and Trinummus (Bryn Mawr College Monographs: Monograph Series, vol. X. 1911)