Public Biography
Dr. Eleanor Fitch is a professor of comparative mythology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, where she has taught since 2009. She holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Chicago and a Master of Arts in classical languages from the University of Edinburgh.
Dr. Fitch specializes in cross-cultural warrior death traditions, a field she describes as “surprisingly well-funded given that no one alive can confirm the findings.” Her 2017 monograph, The Last Opponent: Combat Eschatology in Indo-European Myth, examined the recurring motif of warriors who fight supernatural gatekeepers to enter paradise and was praised by reviewers as “exhaustively researched” and “profoundly unlikely to be read by anyone outside the discipline.”
She has consulted for the History Channel, National Geographic, and several video game studios seeking to give their boss fights “mythological legitimacy.” She regards only the academic work as serious but concedes that the video game consulting “pays for the fieldwork.”
Dr. Fitch lives in Houston’s Montrose neighborhood with two cats named Achilles and Patroclus, a naming choice she insists is “purely literary.”