Emma Dench

Emma Dench is the Dean of the Harvard Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History and of the Classics. A Roman historian and classicist who holds appointments in the Departments of the Classics and of History, Dench was appointed dean in 2018, after serving as interim dean the year prior.

During her term as dean, Dench has worked to enhance the quality of the graduate student academic and personal experience. The Advising Project (TAP), which she spearheaded, works to enhance the advising of graduate students by identifying and communicating best practices in advising and offering mentoring training to faculty and mentoring-up training to students. Dench expanded on this work by engaging a group of faculty in the GSAS Admissions and Graduate Education working group, which considered what PhD education should look like in the 21st century. Harvard Griffin GSAS is now implementing their recommendations. Dench also makes student wellbeing a focus of her deanship and chaired the working group for graduate and professional students as part of the University’s task force on managing student mental health.

Since joining Harvard in 2007, Dench has earned a Harvard College Professorship in recognition of “outstanding contributions to undergraduate teaching, mentoring, and advising,” a John R. Marquand Award for Exceptional Advising and Counseling, and an Everett Mendelsohn Excellence in Mentoring Award for her mentorship of graduate students. Regarding her academic research, Dench’s most recent book, Empire and Political Cultures in the Roman World, reviews a hundred years of scholarship to identify how empire transformed the Roman world, and advances a new theory of how the empire worked and was experienced. She has authored From Barbarians to New Men: Greek, Roman, and Modern Perceptions of Peoples from the Central Apennines, and Romulus’ Asylum: Roman Identities from the Age of Alexander to the Age of Hadrian. Dench has also published articles and reviews on many aspects of classical antiquity, including pre-Roman and Roman Italy, the workings of the Roman Empire and identity. Her current research explores the idea and practice of Barbarian identity, as well as divine interaction in the Roman imperial world, and life and leadership lessons from Rome.

Dench grew up near Stratford-upon-Avon and studied at Wadham College where she was awarded a double first in Classics. She also studied at St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, where she obtained her DPhil in Ancient History. She has taught classics and ancient history at Birbeck College, University of London, she served as a Rome Scholar and a Hugh Last Fellow at the British School at Rome, and she was a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study. She was also a visiting professor of the Classics and of History at Harvard, a Loeb Classical Library Foundation Fellow, and a Visiting Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. In 2016, she delivered the prestigious JH Gray Lectures at the University of Cambridge.