The Lesche podcast is very near and dear to my heart.
The show is invaluable for someone like me who is returning seriously to Classics after many years away from formal study. Lesche lays open the process of serious academic research and publication. You’ll find out what questions scholars are investigating, how they find and select relevant evidence, and how the research is organized into a fascinating book or article. The show doesn't just tell you about Greece and Rome; it shows you what it means to study Classics today.
The show covers a broad array of topics related to Classical scholarship, conducted through conversations with active scholars about their latest work. Listening to the show gives you something I’ve yet to find in other Classics podcast provides: an up-the-minute view of Classical Studies. Quite often you’ll hear about books that haven’t yet been reviewed by the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. The show nearly guarantees that you’ll know about 2 or 3 works when receiving the BMCR “books received” email.
The host, Dr. Johanna Hanink, is a professor at Brown University and is herself an active scholar. She is an engaging and exceptionally well-prepared interviewer who directs fascinating discussions with her guests. Rather than simply asking an author to summarize a new book, she pursues the intellectual process behind it: How did you decide on this area of inquiry? How is your work responding to and updating previous scholarship? What are your sources, and how did you find them? How did you decide the temporal endpoints? What are the key takeaways for listeners?
In effect, she teaches listeners how scholars engage with and challenge existing scholarship, rather than simply promoting their books.
What I absolutely love is that the episodes extend well beyond canonical Greek and Latin literature. It’s easy to find podcasts that discuss the familiar tragedies and epics we all know and love. This show does some of that, but the value lies in the broader scope. Lesche dives into history, archaeology, material culture, philosophy, religion, translation and philology, environmental history, gender, reception, and even touches on Byzantine studies. Across roughly fifty episodes, history and politics account for about eleven, literature and performance for seven, with the remainder ranging widely across the other areas of the discipline.
And that breadth has changed my own reading. I routinely finish an episode wanting to pursue a subject I knew little or nothing about an hour earlier. Lesche has introduced me to scholars, texts, methodologies, and even entire areas of Classical Studies that I otherwise might never have encountered. It has also helped me see connections among subjects I had previously thought of as separate—literature and material culture, for example, or translation and textual scholarship.
Listener beware: you will purchase the books written by her guests! The expensive ones, perhaps, after a glass or two of wine- my favored condition for making important purchasing decisions.
Dr. Hanink draws on a wide network of scholars throughout the field, and she herself contributed to some of the publications being discussed. The result is less like an author interview and more like eavesdropping in a Classics faculty lounge.
Some of my favorite episodes have featured:
Paul Kosmin — The Ancient Shore, an example of an out-of-left-field work that changed my view on how we relate to the physical world
Verity Platt — Seal-Impressions (typoi) and Ancient Image Making
James Diggle — The Cambridge Greek Lexicon, including the extraordinary challenges of updating a massive scholarly resource over a twenty-four-year project. Professor Diggle has a wonderfully dry sense of humor, and parts of the episode are quite touching.
Daniel Mendelsohn — Translating the Odyssey, a fascinating look into the process of creating what is, to my taste, the best translation of The Odyssey
Emma Greensmith and Tim Whitmarsh — (Imperial) Greek Epic, a great introduction to going beyond the familiar epics
John Ma — The Longue Durée of the Greek Polis, an amazing large-scale view of how the ancient world was organized
I love that younger scholars often appear, not just the most established figures in the field.
Collectively the episodes begin to answer my larger questions as I travel this ancient road: how can a deeper understanding of the ancient Mediterranean world help me understand the intellectual and cultural world we live in? From there, I hope to expand that understanding through studies of the important and fascinating intellectual histories of Asia, Africa and the Americas. The scholarly process that Lesche explores in each episode helps me develop the tools for meeting that goal.
I would highly recommend this show to students and specialists, but especially to serious general listeners like me. I frequently learn about an unfamiliar text, historical problem, or scholarly approach that sends me off on a new line of investigation. Lesche feeds my curiosity an astounding 24 times a year! I am so very grateful to Dr Hanink for her energy and commitment to making this show I love so much.
