Professor Marguerite Johnson FAHA was born in 1965. Marguerite received her Bachelor of Arts (Honours in Classical Civilisation) at The University of Newcastle in 1988 and was awarded the University Medal. After a brief period exploring her interests in poetry and art, she returned to the University of Newcastle after the abolition of full-year courses in 1989. This enabled the discipline of Classics to develop semester-length topics, and Marguerite began part-time teaching in 1992, at first in Greek and Roman Epic, Greek Tragedy and the sections of Sparta on women and religions, and then with her own new course Women in the Ancient World. She taught at the Central Coast Campus in Ourimbah from 1995, and earned her PhD in 1997, completing a thesis on Catullus’ Lesbia and her early Greek models. A full-time lectureship and a relocation to the main campus at Callaghan soon followed. She was rapidly promoted to Senior Lecturer and then Associate Professor and became a full Professor in 2017. She was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 2022.
Marguerite was a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She was also a prominent figure in Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite was interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, and in folktale and myth in both ancient and modern cultures.
Her many publications began with the anthology Sexuality in Greek and Roman Society and Literature, co-edited with Terry Ryan (Routledge 2005). All her later books were published by Bloomsbury; they included monographs on Boudicca (2012), and Sappho (2017), and an edition of Ovid on Cosmetics (2016); she was also co-editor with Harold Tarrant of Alcibiades and the Socratic Lover-Educator (2012). More recently she was editor of and contributor to Antipodean antiquities: classical reception down under (2019), co-editor with Han Baltussen of A Cultural History of Love vol. 1: Antiquity, and co-editor with James E . Bennett of, and contributor to Gay conversion practices in memoir, film and fiction: stories of repentance and defiance (2024). She also did much to inform a wider public of the importance of classical studies through book reviews and frequent contributions to The Conversation.
Marguerite was an avowed and determined feminist scholar, and almost all of her important published work on the ancient world is concerned with sexuality. The co-authored 2005 anthology was revised and updated for a second edition in 2022; it is an essential sourcebook. Her monograph on Sappho, though short and aimed at the general reader, is significant and full of insight; and Ovid on Cosmetics is the first English scholarly edition of Medicamina faciei femineae and related texts, with full and illuminating notes. She was also a natural choice to join Han Baltussen as co-editor of the Antiquity volume of A Cultural History of Love (it is a pity that she did not contribute a chapter of her own). Among her many articles on the ancient world ‘Performing Theocritus’ Pharmakeutria: Revealing Hellenistic Witchcraft’ (Arethusa 2021; co-authored with Nicole Kimball) is a particularly important study. Her interests in sexuality and magic led her to explore some subjects far outside the classics; the autopsy on Saara Baartman (the ‘Hottentot Venus’), the practices and art of Australian ‘witch’ Rosaleen Norton, the involvement in sex occultism of Eugene Goosens (first conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra), and pedagogic approaches for teaching ‘entangled Australian sexual histories’ all formed the subject of sole or co-authored articles.
Antipodean antiquities is only the most important of her contributions to reception studies. A fascinating book chapter ‘Ancient and modern Sapphos in France, England and the United States’ (in The Cambridge Companion to Sappho, 2021) exhibits at its best her distinctive socio-cultural approach. And the 2012 Boudicca monograph, although it naturally focuses on evaluating the accounts of Tacitus and Cassius Dio, also explores the portrayal of the Icinean Queen in literature and art right through to the present day.
Marguerite was a warm and generous teacher, and by the end of her time at Newcastle she had built up a group of over a dozen RHD students, whose research topics ranged across the wide focus of her own interests. She was also the invaluable Dramaturg for my own very successful productions of Love Magic (Theocritus’ Idyll 2, 2019) Medea (2021), and Lysistrata (2022), which brought ancient Greek drama to contemporary Newcastle audiences. She also linked her classical background to the Australian experience by delivering well-received papers on the visual representation of Pemulwy (linked to Herakles) and the architecture of Newcastle City Hall (compared with the Pharos lighthouse).
She died tragically in a road accident on the island of Lesvos in July 2026. She and her wife Leni relocated there after her resignation in 2024 from a chair in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Newcastle. At the time of her death, she held an Honorary Professorship at the University of Queensland.
She is survived by her young adult children Kate and Jack.
