Rate My Professor Mathias Hanses

Mathias Hanses is the Melvin and Rosalind Jacobs Endowed Fellow in the Humanities and Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, African Studies, and African American Studies in the Department of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Columbia University (2015), an M.Phil. in Classics from Columbia University (2012), an M.A. in Classics from the University of Illinois (2009), and an M.A. in American Studies from the University of Münster, Germany (2009). Promoted to associate professor effective July 1, 2022, Hanses specializes in Latin literature including Roman drama, race, status, and difference in the ancient Roman world, and Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome or Black Classicism. His research explores receptions of classical texts in African American intellectual history, particularly W. E. B. Du Bois's engagements with Cicero, as well as racial dynamics in Roman comedy and oratory.

Hanses's scholarship has earned a Loeb Classical Library Fellowship and a residency at Penn State's Humanities Institute to support his forthcoming monograph Black Cicero: W. E. B. Du Bois, the Ancient Romans, and the Future of Classical Scholarship (Oxford University Press). His first book, The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence (University of Michigan Press, 2020), traces the reception of fabula palliata from Cicero to Juvenal. Other projects under contract include Race in Roman Comedy (Cambridge University Press) and Cicero and the Rhetorics of Race (Yale University Press, with Hannah Čulík-Baird). Key articles feature 'Africa ipsa parens: Racializing Representations of Sardinians in Cicero’s Pro Scauro (54 BCE)' (TAPA, 2024), 'Caesar – Lucan – Addison: Three Moments in the Racialization of Ancient Numidians' (BICS, 2025), 'Men among Monuments: Roman Memory and Roman Topography in Plautus’s Curculio' (Classical Philology, 2020), and 'Cicero Crosses the Color Line: The Pro Archia Poeta and W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk' (International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 2019). He is co-founder and co-president of Eos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome, first vice president of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, junior financial trustee of the Society for Classical Studies, and co-editor of the De Gruyter series ANTIC (Anticolonial Classics). Hanses teaches Latin, classical mythology, and courses like Greece, Rome, and Africa, and leads study abroad trips to Rome, accepting graduate students and advancing interdisciplinary dialogues on race and reception in classics.