Eleanor Winsor Leach

Leach won many fellowships and awards (listed below) including ACLS, NEH, and Guggenheim fellowships. Leach was Vice-President for the Program Division of the Society for Classical Studies (1991–94) and later President of the Society for Classical Studies (2005/6). She was a trustee of the Vergilian Society (1978–93) and second and then first vice-president of it (1989–92). Leach was on the Classical Jury of the American Academy in Rome (1980–82), a Resident Scholar there (Fall 1983), and later conducted 3 NEH summer seminars there (1986, 1989, 2008). She was President of the central Indiana chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America (1985–87).

Leach published three books - Vergil's Eclogues: Landscapes of Experience (Ithaca, 1974); The Rhetoric of Space: Literary and Artistic Representations of Landscape in Republican and Augustan Rome (Princeton, 1988); The Social Life of Painting in Ancient Rome and on the Bay of Naples (Cambridge, 2004) - with another forthcoming - Epistolary Dialogues: Constructions of Self and Others in the Letters of Cicero and the Younger Pliny (University of Michigan Press). Leach's work had an interdisciplinary focus, reading Latin texts against their social, political, and cultural context. From the 1980s onwards, she combined her work on ancient literature with the study of Roman painting, monuments, and topography.

Eleanor Winsor Leach taught at Bryn Mawr (1962–66), Villanova University (1966–71), University of Texas at Austin (1972–74), Wesleyan University (1974–76), and Indiana University, Bloomington (1977-2018). When she joined the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University, she was the only tenured woman. She was chair of the department between 1978-1985, and was the Director of Graduate Studies between 1997-2016.

Eleanor Winsor Leach was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College, where she took her A.B. magna cum laude with honors in Latin in 1959. She achieved her M.A. from Yale University in 1960. She achieved her Ph.D. in English and Latin from Yale University in 1963, with her dissertation focused on Ovid and Chaucer.

Eleanor Winsor Leach (August 16, 1937 – February 16, 2018) was the Ruth N. Halls Professor with the Department of Classical Studies at Indiana University. She was a trustee of the Vergilian Society in 1978-83 and was second and then first vice-president in 1989-92. Leach was the president of the Society of Classical Studies (formerly, the American Philological Association) in 2005/6, and the chair of her department (1978-1985). She was very involved with academics and younger scholars - directing 26 dissertations, wrote letters for 200 tenure and promotion cases, and refereed more than 100 books and 200 articles. Leach's research interests included Roman painting, Roman sculpture, and Cicero and Pliny's Letters. She published three books (with another forthcoming) and more than 50 articles. Leach's work had an interdisciplinary focus, reading Latin texts against their social, political, and cultural context. From the 1980s onwards, she combined her work on ancient literature with the study of Roman painting, monuments, and topography.