About Debra Hamel

Debra is the mother of two preternaturally attractive girls. She writes and blogs from her subterranean lair in North Haven, Connecticut. (Follow the author on Twitter.)



Background

Debra studied classics as an undergraduate at The Johns Hopkins University and again as a graduate student at Yale, where she specialized in ancient history. Since receiving her Ph.D. in 1996 she has published a number of scholarly articles and reviews as well as publications for a general audience, including several articles that have appeared in MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. (For a complete list of her classics publications, click here.)

Books

Trying Neaira was published by Yale University Press in 2003 and is now available in paperback. The book was written for a popular audience and has been well received by reviewers.

The Sunday Telegraph calls Trying Neaira a "gripping story of politics, sex and sleaze in ancient Athens...."

The Erotic Review writes that Hamel "turns one of antiquity's more fibrous epochs into a lively and witty slice of history, and gives us a story of cupidity, greed and obduracy, spiced with sexual morsels."

To read more reviews of Trying Neaira click here.

Debra is also the author of Athenian Generals: Military Authority in the Classical Period, which was published by Brill Academic Publishers in 1998.

Blogs

More recently Debra has been concentrating on her slice of cyberspace. She publishes a personal blog at the-deblog.com and has been writing book reviews for publication on her site, book-blog.com, since 2003. She is also the creator of three bite-sized literary sites: TwitrLit, KidderLit, and ScatterLit.

In October of 2010 she created The Twitter Herodotus (with the Twitter account @iHerodotus), where she is slowly posting an abbreviated version of Herodotus for the Twitter age: one 140-character tweet per day, one tweet per section of the History.



Interviews and Essays

You can read a lengthier description of Trying Neaira in this piece by the author written for ReadySteadyBook.

Read an interview with Debra (as well as a review of the book) on Damian McNicholl's Blog.

Read Debra's three-part series as guest blogger at Sphinx Rising: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.