Kelly Wrenhaven

Kelly Wrenhaven is Professor of Classics and the Director of Classical and Medieval Studies at Cleveland State University. She holds degrees from the University of St Andrews, the University of Cambridge, and the University of British Columbia. Before coming to Cleveland State in 2008, she taught at St Andrews, Trinity College Dublin, and the University of Victoria. Her research interests include ancient Greek slavery, epigraphy, especially manumission documents, the use of evidential torture in Greek law courts, ancient sepulchral inscriptions and relief sculpture with a concentration upon how status was illustrated, depictions of courtesans in art and literature and, more broadly, ancient ideas about prostitution and sexuality. She has taught many different aspects of ancient Greek and Roman civilizations and has published on a variety of topics, including history, slavery, religion, manumission, and art. Her first book, Reconstructing the Slave (Bristol Classical Press, 2012), examines how the Greeks used literary, lexical, and artistic images of slaves to justify, naturalize, and perpetuate the institution of slavery in Classical Greece. In addition, she has published comparative research on the Greek comic slave and the American blackface minstrel and slavery and racism in ancient Greek tragedy and 18th century American drama. She has also published research on "Slaves and Sex in Classical Greek Art" (in Slavery and Sexuality in Classical Antiquity, University of Wisconsin Press), the relationship between obscenity and the "Other" (slaves, satyrs, and women) in Greek art and literature (JHS 34.1, 2025), and the torture and punishment of slaves in ancient Greece.
Address: Department of History
2121 Euclid Ave. RT 1319
Cleveland, OH 44115