Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

Johanna Hanink
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In Greek antiquity a lesche (λέσχη) was a spot to hang out and chat. Here Brown University professor Johanna Hanink hosts conversations with fellow Hellenists about their latest work in the field.

  1. DEC 17

    Enchantment Technologies of Ancient Greek Religion

    Tatiana Bur joins me in the Lesche to discuss her new book Technologies of the Marvellous in Ancient Greek Religion (Cambridge University Press 2025).  Ancient texts Homer, Iliad 18 (on Hephaestus and his self-moving tripods) Many Athenian tragedies and comedies that made use of the μηχανή or κράδη (in comedy)Aristotle, Poetics (on the theatrical ‘crane’/μηχανή) The Aristotelian/Peripatetic work Mechanical Questions (Μηχανικά)Philo of Byzantium, Μηχανική Σύνταξη Works on mechanics by Hero of Alexandria Polybios, History 12.13, on the mechanical snail in the procession at Athens Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.5, on Herodes Atticus’ mechanical Panathenaic shipAthenaeus, Deipnosophistai 196a-203c, on the πομπή of Ptolemy PhiladelphusModern bibliography Eric Csapo's work on ancient theaterAlfred Gell’s work on art agency, particularly "technologies of enchantment"Susan Harvey, 2006. Scenting Salvation: Ancient Christianity and the Olfactory Imagination. Berkeley, Ca. Verity Platt, 2011. Facing the Gods: Epiphany in Graeco-Roman Art, Literature, and Religion. Cambridge.Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, 1997. Toward a History of Epistemic Things: Synthesizing Proteins in the Test Tube. Stanford, CA.________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    52 min

  2. DEC 3

    Book reviewing in Classics, with Clifford Ando (BMCR) and Mary Beard (the TLS)

    Mary Beard, Classics editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and Clifford Ando, senior editor of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, join me in the Lesche to discuss the state of Classics reviewing today.  How do the TLS and BMCR assign appropriate reviewers? What makes for a good review? What's the line between critique and nastiness? Why are reviews these days so often lacking in susbtantive criticism? What do editors wish review authors knew or would consider before writing a review? Some bibliography Clifford Ando, "BMCR: A view under the hood." Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2022.11.26. (Read all the papers from the 30th anniversary celebration of BMCR here. Several deal with book reviewing.)Mary Beard, Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations. Liveright 2013. (See especially the Afterword, "Reviewing Classics".)Daniel Mendelsohn, "A Critic's Manifesto," The New Yorker, August 28, 2012.About our guests Clifford Ando teaches Classics and History at the University of Chicago.  His work focuses on the histories of law, religion, and government in the ancient world.  He is the author, editor, and translator of some 20 books, and he has served as an editor, associate editor, or senior editor of Bryn Mawr Classical Review for not quite twenty years. Mary Beard is professor emerita of classics at the University of Cambridge, a fellow of Newnham College, and professor of Ancient Literature at the Royal Academy. She is also the classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, a fellow of the British Academy, and an international member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  She is the author of more than twenty books on the ancient world. Her latest book, Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, is due out in spring 2026 with Profile Books (UK) and the University of Chicago Press (USA). ________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    1 hr

  3. NOV 19

    The Ancient Shore

    Harvard University historian Paul Kosmin joins me in the Lesche to discuss his recent book The Ancient Shore (Harvard University Press 2024), winner of the American Historical Association's 2025 Prize in History Prior to CE 1000.  Works mentioned Agatharchides of Cnidus, On the Erythraean Sea (2nd C. BC)Philip de Loutherbourg, "Shipwreck" (painting, 1793).Demuth, Bathsheba. 2019. Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. W. W. Norton.Dening, Gregory Moore. 1980. Islands and Beaches: Discourse on a Silent Land, Marquesas, 1774–1880. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.About our guest Paul Kosmin completed his undergraduate degree at Oxford and earned a PhD in Ancient History from Harvard University in 2012. He was appointed an Assistant Professor in Harvard's Classics Department in 2012, was tenured in 2019, and in 2020 became the Philip J. King Professor of Ancient History, where he currently serves as Interim Chair. His research focuses on the political and cultural history of the ancient Greek world, concentrating on the globalizing and colonial Hellenistic period, and now includes an environmentally-oriented turn. ________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    54 min

  4. NOV 5

    The Life of Demosthenes

    James Romm joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new biography Demosthenes: Democracy's Defender. The book is a part of Yale University Press's Ancient Lives series, of which James is also the editor.  James's author website Ancient texts mentioned Demosthenes, speechesAeschines, speechesAbout our guest James Romm is an author, reviewer, and the James H. Ottaway Jr. Professor of Classics at Bard College in Annandale, NY. He specializes in ancient Greek and Roman culture and civilization. His reviews and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the London Review of Books, the Daily Beast, and other venues. He has held the Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), the Birkelund Fellowship at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at the New York Public Library (2010-11), and a Biography Fellowship at the Leon Levy Center of the City University of New York (2014-15). ________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    52 min

  5. OCT 22

    "Bilingual" Ionic Column Capitals

    Sam Holzman joins me in the Lesche to discuss "bilingual" Ionic column capitals (i.e., column capitals that combined an archaic convex style of relief carving with a more modern concave style). These are the subject of his book Retrospective Columns: Ionic Capitals and Perceptions of the Past in Greek Architecture, which just came out with Princeton University Press. Ancient source Vitruvius, de Architectura, esp. Books 3 & 4.Modern works Architectural drawings in James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens and Julien-David Le Roy's Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce.Alzinger, Wilhelm. 1967. "Alt-Ephesos: Topographie und Architektur." Das Altertum 13.1: 20-44.Hanink, Johanna. Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy. Cambridge 2014.Rudwick, Martin J. S. 1976. "The Emergence of a Visual Language for Geological Science 1760—1840," History of Science 14.3: 149-95.Schmidt-Dounas, Barbara. 2005. "Frühe Peripteraltempel in Nordgriechenland." Mitteilungen des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, Athenische Abteilung 120: 107-41.About our guest Sam Holzman is an assistant professor in the Department of Art & Archaeology and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University. He received his BA from Brown, where his senior thesis advisor in Classics was none other than Professor Hanink! He also received an MPhil from Cambridge and PhD from UPenn. He has excavated in Greece and Turkey and now leads the architectural research team of American Excavations Samothrace.  ________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    49 min

  6. OCT 8

    Classicism and Other Phobias, with Dan-el Padilla Peralta

    Dan-el Padilla Peralta joins me in the Lesche to discuss the critique of classicism that he articulates in his recent book Classicism and Other Phobias (PUP 2025). Works mentioned (select) Adeshei Carter, Jacoby. “Racing the Canon.” In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Luvell Anderson, 163–174. New York: Routledge, 2017.Baldwin, James. “Stranger in the Village.” Harper’s Magazine, October 1953.Du Bois, W. E. B. Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1920.Eccleston, Sasha-Mae, and Dan-el Padilla Peralta. “Racing the Classics: Ethos and Praxis.” American Journal of Philology 144, no. 2 (2023): 199–218.de la Vega, Garcilaso. Royal Commentaries of the Incas and General History of Peru. Translated by Harold V. Livermore. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966.Guevara, Ernesto “Che.” The Congo Diary: Episodes of the Revolutionary War in the Congo. Edited by Mary-Alice Waters. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 1999.Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.Morrison, Toni. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” The Tanner Lectures on Human Values. Delivered at the University of Michigan, October 7, 1988.Proctor, Hannah. Burnout: A Guide to the Psychopolitical Condition. London: Pluto Press, 2024.Shia, Moon-Ho Jung. Archive of Tongues: An Intimate History of Brownness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021.Umachandran, Mathura, and Marchella Ward, eds. Critical Ancient World Studies: The Case for Forgetting Classics. London: Routledge, 2023.Wynter, Sylvia. Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World. Manuscript, 1970s. Edited version published in Katherine McKittrick, ed., Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015.Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth. Why Arendt Matters. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.About our guest Dan-el Padilla Peralta is professor of Classics, and associated faculty in African American Studies and affiliated faculty in the Programs of Latino Studies and Latin American Studies and the University Center for Human Values, at Princeton University. He is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League (Penguin 2015); Divine Institutions: Religions and Community in the Middle Roman Republic (Princeton 2020); and Classicism and Other Phobias (Princeton 2025). ________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    1h 21m

  7. SEP 24

    The Art of Hellenistic Queenship

    Patricia (Tricia) Kim joins me in the Lesche to discuss the art of Hellenistic queenship -- i.e., art that depicted Hellenistic queens, art patronized by Hellenistic queens, and art that spoke to the construction of queenship across the Hellenistic world.  Egypt Museum on the "Arsinoe-Aphrodite" statue Franck Goddio write-up of the statue Lesche episode 18 is a conversation about Isis Worship in the Greek East (including Egypt) with Lindsey Mazurek. Ancient passage  Pliny, Natural History 34.148 (on Timochares' idea for a floating statue of Arsinoe II) Works mentioned Historical work by Sheila L. Ager, Elizabeth Carney, Sabine Müller, et al. on Hellenistic queenship.Najmabadi, Afsaneh (2006) "Beyond the Americas: Are Gender and Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?" Journal of Women's History 18: 11-21.Parmenter, Christopher Stedman (2024) Racialized Commodities: Long-Distance Trade, Mobility, and the Making of Race in Ancient Greece, C. 700-300 BCE. Oxford.Seaman, Kristen (2020) Rhetoric and Innovation in Hellenistic Art. Cambridge.Smith, R.R.R. (1989) Hellenistic Royal Portraits. Oxford.Stewart, Andrew (1993) Faces of Power: Alexander's Image and Hellenistic Politics. University of California.Waywell, Geoffrey B. (1978) The Free-Standing Sculptures of the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus in the British Museum. London.About our guest Patricia Kim is assistant professor at New York University and author of The Art of Queenship in the Hellenistic World (Cambridge University Press, 2025)—the first book-length study on the visual and material cultures of queenship from the 4th-2nd centuries B.C.E, across the eastern Mediterranean and western Asia. She is guest-curator of a forthcoming exhibition on ancient queenship at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Getty Villa (2027).  ________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    55 min

  8. SEP 10

    Why Classicists Should Care about Byzantium, with Anthony Kaldellis

    Anthony Kaldellis joins me in the Lesche to discuss an in-progress edited volume about the transmission of classical texts in the East Roman Empire (aka Byzantium), and why, more generally, classicists should be better informed about the Greek Middle Ages, aka the Byzantine Millennium. Anthony is the host of a wonderful podcast called Byzantium and Friends, which was (and still is) a major inspiration for Lesche. Ancient texts mentioned Photius, BibliothecaEustathius of Thessalonica's commentaries on the Iliad and the OdysseySome bibliography Anthony has written a huge amount. During this episode we mention in particular:his "minigraph" Byzantium Unbound (Arc Humanities 2019)his groundbreaking article "The Byzantine Role in the Making of the Corpus of Classical Greek Historiography: A Preliminary Investigation," in the 2012 issue of the Journal of Hellenic Studies (vol. 132).Baukje van den Berg, Homer the Rhetorician: Eustathios of Thessalonike on the Composition of the Iliad. (Oxford 2022).Elizabeth Jeffreys, "We need to talk about Byzantium: or, Byzantium, its reception of the classical world as discussed in current scholarship, and should classicists pay attention?" Classical Receptions Journal 6 (2014) 158-74.Filippomaria Pontani, "Scholarship in the Byzantine Empire (529-1453)," in F. Montanari, ed., History of Ancient Greek Scholarship: From the Beginnings to the End of the Byzantine Age (Brill 2020).Listen to Anthony's "Byzantium and Friends" podcast episdoe, in which he and Pontani discuss the article, here.L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature. 4th edn. Oxford 2013.About our guest Anthony Kaldellis is a professor of Classics at the University of Chicago. He has published many books and articles on the history, culture, and literature of Byzantium, ranging from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries. His most recent book is a comprehensive history of the eastern Roman empire: The New Roman Empire: A History of Byzantium (Oxford, 2023). He is also the host of the academic podcast “Byzantium & Friends.” ________________________________ Thanks for joining us in the Lesche! Podcast art: Daniel Blanco Theme music: "The Song of Seikilos," recomposed by Eftychia Christodoulou using Sibelius This podcast is made possible with the generous support of Brown University’s Department of Classical Studies and the John Nicholas Brown Center for Advanced Study. Instagram: @leschepodcast Email: leschepodcast@gmail.com Suggest a book using this form

    1h 12m
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In Greek antiquity a lesche (λέσχη) was a spot to hang out and chat. Here Brown University professor Johanna Hanink hosts conversations with fellow Hellenists about their latest work in the field.

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  • Creator
    Johanna Hanink
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2025
  • Episodes
    36
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas
  • Show Website
    Lesche: Ancient Greece, New Ideas

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