Hans Wietzke

Hans Wietzke has a BA from Carleton College, an MPhil from the University of Oxford, and a PhD from Stanford University, and previously taught at Carleton College and Trinity University in San Antonio. A philologist by training, he is broadly interested in the textual practices that make up Greek and Roman knowledge traditions. His current book project, Herodotus' Laughter: Media and Aesthetics in Greek Science and Geography, investigates how Greek scientific and geographical authors negotiated fundamental choices of textual form—verbal or visual, poetry or prose—to make complex information about the world comprehensible, even desirable, and it shows how these choices were shaped according to broader cultural aesthetics. He is also interested in the authorial persona and how it shaped the organization of knowledge in antiquity. Aside from his research interests, he enjoys teaching courses that introduce students to the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome and the tools and methods by which we engage with them. He is also active in the adaptation and performance of ancient drama and has co-directed, acted in, and co-translated productions with Stanford Classics in Theater and the SCS Committee for Ancient and Modern Performance.

• “Speaking wit to power: reconsidering royal patronage through Archimedes’ Sand-Reckoner,” forthcoming (April 2022) in Classical Antiquity (25,000 words).
• “The public face of expertise: utility, zeal and collaboration in Ptolemy’s Syntaxis,” in Authority and Expertise in Ancient Scientific Culture, eds. Jason König and Greg Woolf. Cambridge University Press, 2017: 348-373.
• “Strabo’s expendables: the function and aesthetics of minor authority,” in The Routledge Companion to Strabo, ed. Daniela Dueck. Routledge, 2017: 233-247.
• “A fashionable curiosity: Claudius Ptolemy’s ‘desire for knowledge’ in literary context,” in Cultures of Mathematics and Logic, eds. Shier Ju, Benedikt Loewe, Thomas Mueller, and Yun Xie. Springer, 2016: 81-105.