Andrew Lear works on Greek poetry, Athenian vase-painting, and the history of gender and sexuality. He studied English at Harvard (A.B. 1981) and Creative Writing at CUNY (M.A. 1986) and worked as a fiction editor and lecturer (University of Rome, 1986-9, Harvard 1990-5) before taking an M.A. (University of Virginia 1997) and Ph.D. (UCLA 2004) in Classics. He has held the Bourse Chateaubriand a Mellon Fellowship at the Columbia University Society of Fellows and taught at DePauw University and Pomona College before coming to NYU in 2011.

His first book (co-written with Prof. Eva Cantarella), Images of Ancient Greek Pederasty: Boys Were Their Gods, was published by Routledge in 2008; his second, Paiderastia: history of a custom, from the Age of Homer to the end of pagan Antiquity, is under consideration at Cambridge University Press. He has written articles on topics including the Greek poets Anacreon and Theognis, as well as book reviews for Classical World. His poems and translations have appeared in such journals as Persephone, the Southern Humanities Review, and Literary Imagination.

Prof. Lear has taught Greek and Latin at all undergraduate levels and graduate seminars on Homer (Odyssey) and Plato (Symposium). Courses in translation have included Attic tragedy, Classical mythology, the Greek hero, Greek history, “Rome, from Republic to Empire,” ancient Mediterranean history, and “Same-Sex Love in the Classical World.” At NYU, he is teaching introductory and intermediate Latin and will teach a course on gender and sexuality in Antiquity this spring semester.