Gowers attended Oxford High School. She studied Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge and was awarded her BA in 1985 followed by her MA in 1990. Gowers remained in Cambridge for her PhD with a dissertation entitled The representation of food in Roman literature in 1990 for which she was awarded the Hare Prize. She was a Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1988 to 1991.
Academic career
From 1991 to 1993, Gowers was a lecturer in Latin at University College, London followed by a period as an honorary research fellow at the same institution. In 1998 Gowers became an affiliated lecturer for the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge and then moved to Princeton University in 2000 as a lecturer in the Department of Classics. She returned to Cambridge as a lecturer in Classics in 2002 and became a Senior Lecturer in 2009. Since 2013 Gowers has been a Reader in Latin Literature. Gowers was made Professor of Latin Literature in 2016. Gowers's work on the representation of food in Latin literature stemmed from her PhD research into the subject. Her 1993 publication, The Loaded Table, was awarded the Premio Langhe Ceretto in 1994 and translated into Italian in 1996. This work drew together evidence from literature for Roman diet and food culture. Gowers's current work focuses primarily on the interpretation of Augustan literature, particularly the works of Horace. She was awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship for her project Maecenas: Transformations of an Augustan Patron. In 2012 Gowers was a Visiting Professor and Distinguished Webster Lecturer, Stanford University and in 2014 she was a Visiting Professor for the Spring Semester at Princeton University. She delivered the 2013 Fowler Lecture on the subject "Maecenas and the Women". In 2013-14 Gowers was a guest speaker in the Classical Studies Department of McGill University. Gowers will be the Sather Professor of Classics at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021/2, the eleventh woman to be invited to hold the position. The role was founded by Jane K. Sather, with the first Sather Professor established in 1914. The position is annual, and involves teaching a course, delivering lectures on a specific topic, and publishing the lectures as a book. In 2018 Gowers was appointed a Member of the Press Syndicate at , a role that contributes to the governance of the press. Gowers regularly reviews books for the Times Literary Supplement.
In 1988, Gowers married Timothy Gowers, a mathematician and Cambridge academic: they divorced in 2007. Together they have three children.
Selected publications
Tasting the Roman World in K. C. Rudolph, ed., Taste and the Ancient Senses
Under the Influence: Maecenas and Bacchus in Georgics 2 in P. Hardie, ed., Augustan Poetry and the Irrational
Girls will be boys and boys will be girls, or, what is the gender of Horace's Epodes? in P. Bather and C. Stocks, eds., Horace's Epodes: Contexts, Intertexts, and Reception
