DEBBIE FELTON is Professor of Classics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her specialty is folklore in classical literature, and she regularly teaches courses on Greek mythology as well as on magic and witchcraft in the ancient world. She has been the editor of the journal Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural since 2015.
Her first book, Haunted Greece and Rome: Ghost Stories from Classical Antiquity (University of Texas Press, 1999), illuminates the oral and written transmission of the ghost story as a literary form. Her second book, the edited volume Landscapes of Dread in Classical Antiquity, examines fear-related emotions across various genres of Graeco-Roman literature. She is also editor of and contributor to A Cultural History of Fairy Tales in Antiquity (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her book Monsters and Monarchs: Serial Killers in Classical Myth and History (University of Texas Press, 2021) adds evidence from ancient Greece and Rome to the ongoing debate about the nature of serial killing. And she is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth (Oxford, 2024).
Professor Felton enjoys bringing research on classical antiquity into the public sphere, and has given dozens of interviews about her work that 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, California Haunts Radio, and Classical Wisdom.