Mathias Hanses

Professional Bio

Mathias Hanses is associate professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean studies (CAMS) and Africana studies (AFS). He works on Latin literature (including Roman drama); Africana receptions of ancient Greece and Rome; and race, status, and difference in the ancient Roman world. His most recent book is Black Cicero: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Ancient Romans in the 19th and 20th Centuries (2026). It was supported by a Loeb Classical Library Fellowship and a Residency in Penn State’s Humanities Institute. He is currently writing a book called Race in Roman Comedy (under contract with Cambridge University Press) and co-writing with Hannah Čulík-Baird a monograph tentatively called Cicero and the Rhetorics of Race (under contract with Yale University Press). His first book, published in 2020 by the University of Michigan Press, is called The Life of Comedy after the Death of Plautus and Terence. It explores the reception of the fabula palliata in Latin literature from Cicero to Juvenal.

In addition to the above projects, Hanses has published on graffiti in Pompeii, magic in Ovid, Greek and Roman wordplay, Roman historiography, the classics in U.S.-American politics, art, and literature, and the history of classical scholarship. He has presented his research in Britain, Germany, Italy, Greece, Ghana, Mexico, Serbia, South Africa, Portugal, Canada, and across the United States. He is co-founder and co-president of Eos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome, Junior Financial Trustee of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), and co-editor of the new De Gruyter book series ANTIC (Anticolonial Classics: Race, Imperialism, and the Ancient Mediterranean).

At Penn State, Dr. Hanses won the Outstanding Teaching Award for Tenure-Line Faculty in the College of the Liberal Arts in 2026. He offers classes that introduce students to the varied texts and people(s) of the Roman Mediterranean; Latin language and literature; interactions between Greece, Rome, and Africa; and the material remains of the ancient world. He frequently runs the summer study abroad trip to Rome, co-created the new CAMS program in Egypt, and runs an embedded program in Tunisia. View his CV.