Sharon Lynn James (2 January 1960 – 28 December 2023) was a Classicist and Professor of Classics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She was an expert in Latin poetry, women and gender in antiquity, New Comedy, and Italian epic.

Her doctoral thesis, "Dolcezza di figlio, pieta del vecchio padre": Parents and Children in the Iliad, the Aeneid, and the Divine Comedy, examined child-parent relationships in Homer, Vergil, and Dante.

In 2012, James co-led an NEH summer institute program, "Roman Comedy in Performance.

[5] She held numerous national leadership positions, including chair for the Society for Classical Studies Membership Committee (2018–2021), sitting on the editorial board of the journal Mouseion (2012–2015); and serving on the prize committee for the American Journal of Philology (2016–2018).