Laura Slatkin gained an interest in education from her father, a high school English teacher, at an early age.[2] She studied for a BA in Greek at Radcliffe College, before moving to Cambridge University for an MA in Classics. Her PhD in Greek was completed at Harvard in 1979.[3] In 1976, she began teaching at University of California Santa Cruz, becoming one of the first group of classicists working in the new department there, along with Gary Miles, Mary-Kay Gamel and John P. Lynch.[4]: 151 She remained at UC Santa Cruz until 1980, when she became an Assistant Professor at Yale University for one year.[3] In 1981 she took up a Mellon fellowship at Columbia University, before in 1983 becoming an Assistant, then Associate, professor at the same institution.[3] Between 1993 and 2002 she was an Associate Professor at the University of Chicago, where she won a Quantrell Award in teaching in 1998.[2] Since 2001 she has been a Professor at the Gallatin School, New York University, where she is now a Distinguished Professor in Interdisciplinary Studies.[3][5] She also remains a visiting professor at the University of Chicago.[6]
Slatkin has secured additional fellowships and awards across her career, including an NEH Fellowship for University Teachers (1999), a fellowship at the Columbia University Institute for Scholars, Paris (2007), a Senior Fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies (2011-2016), and Global Research Initiative Fellowships in 2014 and 2015.[3] She served as editor in chief for the journal Classical Philology between 1999 and 2001.[7][8]
Slatkin is best known for her work in Greek Literature, with particular interests in gender studies, ancient wisdom, and Greek and Roman poetry. Her first book, The Power of Thetis (1992) was described on its reissuing in 2011 as an "influential and widely admired book",[9] and inspired the publication of a further volume on the goddess Thetis in 2023.[10]