Classical Studies Faculty Directory

Mark Thatcher

Associate Professor of the Practice

Photo of Mark Thatcher

Mark Thatcher

Ph.D.

Contact

Stokes S245

Telephone: 617-552-1807

Email: mark.thatcher@bc.edu

Education

  • Ph.D., Brown University

Courses

Greek History, Greeks and Barbarians, Multiculturalism in the Roman Empire, Ancient Sicily, Elementary Latin, Intermediate Greek, Advanced Greek: Greek Rhetoric, Advanced Latin: Roman Civil War Literature

Research Interests

Greek history and historiography; ethnicity and identity; cross-cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean; ancient Sicily.

CV

Profile

Mark Thatcher specializes in Greek history and culture of the Archaic and Classical periods, with a particular focus on cross-cultural connections and concepts of ethnicity and identity in ancient Greece, and on the history of Sicily. His first book investigated how Greeks in Sicily and southern Italy negotiated between multiple types of identity, including ethnicity, polis identity, regional identity, and overarching Hellenic identity, and shows how juxtapositions and contrasts between a community’s multiple (and often contested) identities shaped its social and political history. He is working on a second book on the Sicilian Expedition; other ongoing projects explore Sicily in the Hellenistic period and myth and identity in the Greek West.

Courses

Professor Thatcher teaches a variety of courses in Greek and Latin language, literature, and history, including “Greek History,” “Drama and Society in Ancient Greece,” “Greeks and Barbarians,” and “Multiculturalism in the Roman Empire,” as well as a broad range of language courses from beginning to advanced, including (in Greek) Herodotus, Thucydides, and Sophocles, and (in Latin) Livy and Roman Civil War Literature

Select Publications

  • The Politics of Identity in Greek Sicily and Southern Italy (2021), Oxford University Press
  • “Syracusan Identity between Tyranny and Democracy,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 55 (2012) 73-90. 
  • “Aeschylus’ Aetnaeans, the Palici and Cultural Politics in Deinomenid Syracuse,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 139 (2019) 67-82.
  • “Being Syracusan in the Hellenistic World,” in S. Ager and H. Beck, eds., Localism in the Hellenistic World (forthcoming in 2024 from the University of Toronto Press).
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