Kathleen Coleman was born and raised in Zimbabwe. She studied at the University of Cape Town (BA 1973), the University of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) (BA Hons 1975), and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (DPhil 1979). Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1998, she taught at the University of Cape Town (1979–1993) and held the chair of Latin at Trinity College, Dublin (1993–1998). She is a former Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung.
Professor Coleman is the author of Statius, Silvae IV: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford University Press, 1988, re-issued in paperback by Bristol Classical Press/Duckworth, 1998) and Martial, Liber Spectaculorum: Text, Translation, and Commentary (Oxford University Press, 2006), and co-editor, with J. Diggle, J. B. Hall, and H. D. Jocelyn, of F.R.D. Goodyear. Papers on Latin Literature (Duckworth, 1992) and, with Jocelyne Nelis-Clément, L’organisation des spectacles dans le monde romain, Entretiens 58 (Fondation Hardt, 2012). She is the editor of Le jardin dans l’Antiquité, Entretiens 60 (Fondation Hardt, 2014), and two Loeb Classical Monographs, Images for Classicists (2015), arising from the presidential panel that she organized at the annual meeting of the American Philological Association in 2012, and Albert’s Anthology (2017), a collection of short papers dedicated to Albert Henrichs (1942–2017) by 76 colleagues and students who worked with him over his long and distinguished career.