About

Johanna Hanink is a scholar with a focus on classical studies, Greek history, and modern Greek culture. Her work encompasses a wide range of topics including ancient Greek art, literature, and their influence on contemporary issues, as well as the reception and translation of classical texts. She has contributed to discussions on Greek economy, identity, and the role of classics in modern society through various media outlets, including The Atlantic, Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times. Hanink's research and commentary often explore the intersections of ancient Greece with modern political and cultural contexts, emphasizing critical classical reception and translation, and engaging with contemporary debates about Greece's history and identity.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Art
• Literature
• Law
• Classics
• Aesthetics
• History
• Archaeology
• Ancient history
• Visual arts
• Philosophy
• Geology

Selected publications

• Walter Scheidel. <i>What Is Ancient History?</i>

  The American Historical Review · 2025-09-26

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Homeric Epic and Nation-Building in Modern Greece and Turkey

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024-11-28

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
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• Euripides’ <i>Erechtheus</i> and the Athenian Catalogue of Exploits: How a Tragic Plot Shaped the Funeral Oration

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Literature
  • History

  Funeral orators came to rehearse four 'standard' myths. The classical Athenians believed that the earliest was the victory of their ancestors against an army that the Thracian Eumolpus had led into Attica. The widely held position is that these four mythical erga were a part of the genre from its beginning. Yet, this chapter firmly establishes that this position simply does not hold when it comes to the myth about Eumolpus. Indeed, the first funeral speech to mention it was only the one that Plato wrote soon after the end of the Corinthian War. Before this, there had existed an older myth about Erechtheus, an early Athenian king, and Eumolpus fighting each other. Importantly, however, this myth presented their fight as a civil war between Eleusis, a deme in Attica, and Athens. The new myth, which, by contrast, made Eumolpus and his army foreign invaders, first appeared in Erechtheus, which Euripides wrote at the end of the 420s. As Euripides regularly changed old myths or, simply, invented new ones, Hanink argues that the epitaphic exploit about Eumolpus was originally his invention.

  PublisherDOI

• Chimeras of Classicism in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ Reception of the Athenian Funeral Orations

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Philosophy
  • Literature
  • Art

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus discusses the Athenian funeral orations in his Antiquitates Romanae and his literary-critical essays. He takes a negative view of both the Athenian public funeral and of three specific examples of funeral orations –the Periclean epitaphios in Thucydides, Socrates’ speech in Plato’s Menexenus, and the funeral oration ascribed to Demosthenes (Dem. 60). The nature of his negative pronouncements suggests that his moral aversion to the orations, and to what the public funerals had represented, guided his aesthetic responses to the individual texts. While the encomiastic commonplaces on view in the funeral orations provide the blueprint for Dionysius’ idealised conception of Athens, the speeches themselves are vehicles unworthy of conveying those ideals. The case of the funeral oration offers a good illustration of how Dionysius’ classicism is inherently, recursively nostalgic and so ultimately chimerical. His idealised view of Athens is defined not by the funeral orations themselves, but by the valorisation of authors who made a project of berating their compatriots for failure to live up to the example, and exempla, of earlier generations.

  PublisherDOI

• Reviewing Christopher Witmore’s Old Lands: A Chorography of the Eastern Peloponnese (London: Routledge, 2020)

  Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology · 2021-07-22

  articleSenior author

  a) A Journey to A Chorography: Christopher Witmore&#x0D; b) Old Ways in Old Lands: William Caraher&#x0D; c) Manifesting the Infraordinary: Alfredo González-Ruibal&#x0D; d) This Old Land: Johanna Hanink&#x0D; e) Re-Grounding Chorographically: Christopher Witmore

  PublisherDOI

• WAS THE<i>POLIS</i>A PERSON IN CLASSICAL ATHENS? CIVIC BODIES AND CHORAL POLITICS IN THE THEATER

  Ramus · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • History
  • Literature

  In his History of the Peloponnesian War , Thucydides waits until he has passed the midpoint of Book 1 to introduce an individual speaking ‘character’ into his narrative. He does not do so until the scene of the Congress at Sparta (1.67–88), where it is first ‘the Corinthians’ and then ‘the Athenians’ who plead their cases before the Spartan assembly. One of the functions of this scene is to illustrate the internal division of opinion among the Spartans, and Thucydides now brings two distinct, elite Spartans onstage to voice their conflicting perspectives: King Archidamus addresses his countrymen urging caution (1.80–5), while the ephor Sthenelaidas makes suitably laconic remarks pressing for war (1.86). Before this turning point, Thucydides had carried out his analysis of the war's causes exclusively with reference to foreign rulers and Greek polis -populations (‘the Athenians’, ‘the Spartans’, etc.)—and not to any individual actors or leaders of those poleis , such as Archidamus and Sthenelaidas of Sparta.

  PublisherDOI

• INTRODUCTION: IN TERMS OF ATHENS

  Ramus · 2021-12-01 · 2 citations

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• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Geology

  Case and Susan Foster recruited me to graduate school at the turn of the new millennium

  DOI

• Pausanias’ Dead Poets Society

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2018-10-17 · 13 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the tombs of poets in Pausanias’ <italic>Description of Greece</italic>. It argues that the buried bones of ancient poets, and of heroes featured in their poetry, function as a kind of root system that, in Pausanias’ imagination, nourishes the sacred landscape of Greece, ensuring that the memories it holds always stay lush with life. For Pausanias, poets, through their deaths and their graves, become part of the mythical history that is itself a product of the poets’ imaginations. That history is, within the discursive topography of Pausanias’ <italic>Description</italic>, embodied—and entombed—in a landscape defined by its numinous places and monuments.

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• Scholars and Scholarship on Tragedy

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2018-12-03 · 2 citations

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Frequent coauthors

• Demetra Kasimis

  5 shared

• A Boyle

  Brigham Young University

  4 shared

• Helen Morales

  4 shared

• David L. Eng

  California University of Pennsylvania

  1 shared

• Ioana Man-Cheong

  1 shared

• Maitrayee Bhattacharyya

  Washington University in St. Louis

  1 shared

• Michael D. Kennedy

  Cedarville University

  1 shared

• Christopher Witmore

  1 shared