Catherine Conybeare

Catherine Conybeare is a British scholar of classical philology and late antique literature, internationally recognised as one of the leading experts on the thought of Saint Augustine of Hippo. Born in Bristol in 1966, she studied Classics at the University of Oxford and subsequently Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, where she completed her PhD under the supervision of the historian Brian Stock. Since 2002, she has been teaching at Bryn Mawr College in the United States, where she currently holds the position of Leslie Clark Professor in the Humanities and is a lecturer in Greek, Latin and Classical Studies.

Her research focuses on Latin culture in late antiquity, the relationship between theology and philology, and, in particular, the work of Augustine. Her best-known books include The Irrational Augustine(2006), The Laughter of Sarah (2013) and The Routledge Guidebook to Augustine’s Confessions (2016). In 2025, he published Augustine the African, a new biography of Augustine that offers a fresh interpretation of the Christian thinker by focusing on his African identity and the North African cultural context of the Roman Empire. The book received widespread international attention and was named one of the best books of the year by The New Yorker.

Throughout her career, she has received significant academic honours, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has been a visiting fellow at prestigious institutions such as Oxford, Cambridge and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.