Classical Studies Faculty Directory

Mark Thatcher

Assistant Professor of the Practice

Fields of Interest

I specialize 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. My current book project investigates 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. Other ongoing projects examine differing concepts of Greekness in Greek historiography and Hellenistic poetry and the presentation of indigenous Sicilian religion in Aeschylean tragedy.

Teaching

I teach 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

Representative Publications

“Syracusan Identity between Tyranny and Democracy,” Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies of the University of London 55 (2012) 73-90.