Shadi Bartsch

Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer (born March 17, 1966) is an American academic and is the Helen A. Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago.

She earned a B.A. summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1987 and both her M.A. and Ph.D. (1992) from the University of California, Berkeley in Latin and classics, respectively.

She was awarded an ACLS Fellowship in 1999 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007.

She was awarded the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in the College in 2000 and the Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching in 2006 at the University of Chicago.

She served as chair of the Faculty Board of the University of Chicago Press from 2006 to 2008 and editor-in-chief of Classical Philology from 2000 to 2004 and 2014 onwards.

She has been appointed the inaugural director of the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge and is the lead editor of the journal KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge.

She has previously held professorships at the University of California, Berkeley and Brown University where she was the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics in 2008-2009.

Bartsch is the daughter of a UN economist and spent her childhood in London, Geneva (where she studied at the International School of Geneva), Tehran, Jakarta, and the Fiji Islands.

She was married to University of Chicago president and mathematician Robert Zimmer from 2011 until his death in 2023.

Bartsch has contributed to classical scholarship in the areas of the literature and culture of Julio-Claudian Rome, the ancient novel, Roman stoicism, and the classical tradition.