Helena Dettner, PhD

Helena Dettmer is a Professor of Classics and Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs at the University of Iowa. She earned her BA in Classics at Indiana University and a PhD from the University of Michigan. Dettmer received the University of Iowa’s 2012 Lola Lopes Award for Undergraduate Student Advocacy. A former Mellow Fellow at Duke University, a recipient of the Iowa May Brodbeck Humanities Fellowship, an Iowa Faculty Scholar, and an Iowa collegiate fellow, and past president of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, Helena Dettmer has authored two monographs on the intersection of meaning and structure in Latin poetry, Horace: A Study in Structure (Hildesheim 1983), and Love by the Numbers: Form and Meaning in the Poetry of Catullus (New York, 1997). She is coauthor of A Workbook to Ayers' English Words from Latin and Greek Elements, in its second printing and used widely in vocabulary-building courses around the country, as well as A Catullus Workbook, which she coauthored with LeaAnn Osburn. Her current project is a book-length study examining the poetic structure of Ovid’s Amores.