Debbie Felton

Debbie Felton has a B.A. in English & Latin from UCLA and an M.A. in Greek and Ph.D. in Classics from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has taught at UMass since 1999. The interdisciplinary nature of her research interests has led to her focus on folklore in classical literature, especially anything about the supernatural and monstrous. She has been Editor of the journal Preternature since 2015. Her current project is A Cultural History of Monsters in Antiquity (Bloomsbury), a thematically organized volume with chapters covering monsters from the ancient world with regard to cosmologies, geographies, environments, behaviors, and identities, and including material from Japan China, India, Persia, the ancient Mediterranean, and Mesoamerica.

Professor Felton enjoys bringing research on classical antiquity into the public sphere. Interviews about her work have appeared in various media (newspapers, radio, tv, blogs, podcasts) in the U.S. and Europe, including Peopling the Past, Coast to Coast AM, The Monster Professor, Weird Tales, CBS Mornings, Classical Wisdom, New Books Network, and Ancient History Fangirl. Professor Felton has also presented webinars for ETC (Excellence through Classics) and a master class on ancient ghosts for SASA (Save Ancient Studies Alliance).

Professor Felton also runs The Ancient Monsters Blog, started in summer 2024 with a grant from the UMass Public Engagement Project.

• Editor, The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth. OUP 2024.
• Editor, A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity. Bloomsbury Academic 2021.
• Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History. University of Texas Press 2021.
• Editor, Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity: Negative Emotion in Natural and Constructed Spaces. Routledge 2018.
• Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity. University of Texas Press 1999.

• “The Walking Dead in Ancient Greece and Rome.” In The Palgrave Handbook of the Zombie S. Bacon, ed. (Palgrave 2025).
• “The Vocabulary of Homicidal Horror in Libanius’ ‘Against a Murderer’.” In Horror in Antiquity and Beyond: Body, Affect, Concepts, ed. G. Kazantzidis and C. Thumiger (Bloomsbury 2025: 161–74).
• “Ancient Monsters in Modern Science.” In The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, ed. D. Felton (OUP 2024: 572–87).
• “The Undead and Eternal.” In A Cultural History of Death in Antiquity (500 BCE-800 CE), ed. M. Erasmo (Bloomsbury 2024: 149–67).
• "Power: Uses and Abuses of Authority in Ancient Tales." In A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity. D. Felton, ed. (Bloomsbury 2021: 169–89).
• "Monsters and the Monstrous: Ancient Expressions of Cultural Anxieties." In A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity. D. Felton, ed. (Bloomsbury 2021: 109–30).
• "Brigands and Cruel Kings." In The Oxford Handbook of Heracles. D. Ogden, ed. (OUP 2021: 183–97).