Kathy Eden is an American professor of literature. She is the Chavkin Family Professor of English and Professor of Classics at Columbia University.^[2]

Eden grew up on Long Island, the daughter of a surgeon and a homemaker.^[3] She obtained her BA from Smith College, where she studied under Karl Paul Donfried, and PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University.^[4] Her research has included Renaissance humanism and the history of rhetorical and poetic theory in antiquity.^[4] She also teaches the Core Curriculum for Columbia undergraduates.^[3] Her students in academia included former Modern Language Association president Michael Bérubé and Luke Leafgren, dean of Mather House of Harvard College.^[3][5]

She received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.^[6] In 2019, Eden became a member of the American Philosophical Society.^[7]