Harriet I. Flower

Harriet Isabel Flower (born 1960) is a Swiss-American classicist and historian of ancient Rome. She was the Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where she taught from 2003 until her retirement in 2026. A specialist in Roman history, historiography, and epigraphy, Flower has published on subjects ranging from Roman aristocratic commemorative culture to the periodization of the Roman Republic, local religion, and the lives of educated slaves and freedmen.

A 2022 citation-impact survey of active and retired ancient historians in North America ranked Flower tenth overall and the only woman among the top twenty scholars.

Early life and education

Harriet Isabel Flower was born in Switzerland and moved to the United Kingdom for secondary school.

She then moved to the United States, initially teaching at the University of Rhode Island in the spring of 1984 before taking a position as Latin teacher and head of the department at the Lincoln School, an all-girls preparatory school in Providence, Rhode Island, where she taught from 1984 to 1986. That April, Princeton sponsored a retirement conference in the couple's honor, titled Floralia, at which sixteen former doctoral advisees of the Flowers from both Princeton and Franklin & Marshall presented papers. A reviewer in Choice called the book an important contribution to the study of Roman family history and power politics.

Periodization of the Roman Republic

Roman Republics (Princeton University Press, 2010) has been described by Flower's colleagues as a turning point in her career. Reviewing the book for the Journal of Roman Studies, John Rich credited Flower with challenging traditional approaches to republican chronology, while a Bryn Mawr Classical Review notice deemed the book likely to revitalize study of the period.

Non-elite Roman religion and life

Beginning her term as head of Mathey College in the same year that Roman Republics appeared, Flower spent the following years researching and writing The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner (Princeton University Press, 2017), a study of the cult of the Lares and the Genius, household and neighborhood divinities whose nature was debated by the Romans themselves. The book received the Society for Classical Studies' Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit in 2018.

Teaching and mentorship

Flower received Princeton's Graduate Mentoring Award from the McGraw Center for Teaching and Learning in 2016. Her doctoral students at Princeton and Franklin & Marshall have gone on to faculty positions at institutions including the University of Victoria, the University of California, Santa Barbara, Indiana University, Hunter College, and the University of Delaware, among others. Her mentorship of younger scholars was highlighted at the 2026 Floralia conference marking her retirement, where former advisees from across her career presented research in her honor.

Professional service

Within the Society for Classical Studies (formerly the American Philological Association), Flower served on the Program Committee (2004–06) and on the Charles J. Goodwin Award Committee (2020–23). She has served on the advisory board of the journal Klio: Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte since 2018, and in 2013 was a juror for the Rome Prize. She has also served on the advisory board of an ERC-funded research project on the fragmentary Republican Roman orators (University of Glasgow) and, in 2023, on an external review committee for the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum convened by the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences.

Honors and awards

National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship and Membership, Institute for Advanced Study (2001–02) Visiting Scholar, American Academy in Rome (2006) Corresponding Member, German Archaeological Institute (elected 2008) Graduate Mentoring Award, Princeton University (2016) Charles J. Goodwin Award of Merit, Society for Classical Studies, for The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden (2018) Howard T. Behrman Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities, Princeton University (2018)

Personal life

Flower is married to fellow classicist Michael A. Flower, a historian of ancient Greece and the David Magie '97 Class of 1897 Professor of Classics at Princeton, whom she met before the two joined Franklin & Marshall College together in 1994. Following their joint transfer to emeritus status in 2026, the couple relocated to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Selected publications

Ancestor Masks and Aristocratic Power in Roman Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. The Art of Forgetting: Disgrace and Oblivion in Roman Political Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (editor). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; expanded ed. 2014. East and West: Papers in Ancient History Presented to Glen W. Bowersock (co-editor with T. Corey Brennan). Cambridge, MA: Department of the Classics, Harvard University, 2008. Roman Republics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. The Dancing Lares and the Serpent in the Garden: Religion at the Roman Street Corner. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. Empire and Religion in the Roman World (editor). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Intellectual Property: Learned Slaves and Educated Freedmen in Republican Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.