Center for the Study of the Early Modern World

Johanna Hanink took her Ph.D. in Classics from the University of Cambridge (Queens’ College). Her work in classics focuses on classical Athens, particularly the cultural life of the city's fourth century BCE. She is also interested in the intersections between modern politics and ideas about ancient Greece (and antiquity more generally).

The Classical Debt: Greek Antiquity in an Era of Austerity (Harvard University Press, 2017) is her latest book. It explores how Western fantasies of classical antiquity have created a particularly fraught relationship between the European West and the country of Greece, especially in the context of Greece's recent “tale of two crises.” She has a volume of newly translated selections from Thucydides, How to Think about War: An Ancient Guide to Foreign Policy (Princeton University Press, 2019). She is also the author of Lycurgan Athens and the Making of Classical Tragedy (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and co-editor, with Richard Fletcher, of the volume Creative Lives in Classical Antiquity: Poets, Artists, and Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

She is active in Brown’s Program in Modern Greek Studies and is on the board of the Modern Greek Studies Association. She is also on the editorial boards of The Journal of Modern Greek Studies and Eidolon.