Johanna Hanink
52 episodes listed below
Ancient Greek studies, freshly argued.
Lesche is a measured, specialist-minded conversation show about new work in ancient Greek studies. Hosted by Johanna Hanink, it moves from manuscript margins and Homeric scholarship to seal-impressions, textiles, and the material conditions behind ancient culture.
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Lesche is an academic conversation show about ancient Greek studies and the new research reshaping the field. Johanna Hanink hosts with confidence and patience. Each episode takes a focused subject and shows why it matters beyond its narrow specialist frame. The show can make manuscript margins feel consequential. In the episode on translating the scholia to the Iliad, tiny ancient and medieval notes become evidence for how earlier readers understood classical texts. The conversation moves through commentaries, lexica, papyrus witnesses, the shift from roll to codex, and the scholarship associated with Aristarchus. It is technical material, but the discussion keeps returning to access: how students learn to use these sources, and why the field often assumes knowledge that is difficult to acquire. Other episodes work through images and objects with the same care. Seal-impressions are treated not merely as marks, but as media technologies tied to authority, storage, literacy, transmission, and the value of particular materials. Stories about Protogenes, Apelles, Demetrius the Besieger, Polycrates, Amasis, and the returned seal ring become entry points into Greek ideas about representation and power. The textile episode shifts attention to labor that ancient history often leaves invisible. Clothing, weaving, spinning, and the warp-weighted loom become ways of thinking about civilization, household soundscapes, women’s manual work, and the lived experience of time. The show’s best moments come when abstract scholarship becomes physical: the beat of a loom, the density of a marginal note, the authority carried by a seal. Lesche favors slow explanation over performance. It leaves room for qualified answers, scholarly caution, and genuine discovery in conversation. The tone is collegial and precise, but not sealed off from non-specialists who are willing to listen closely. It is especially strong for listeners who want ancient Greece approached through evidence, method, and the material texture of daily life.
Made for: Best for listeners who enjoy classical studies, ancient history, manuscript culture, material culture, and careful academic conversation. It also suits curious non-specialists who do not mind technical terms when they are explained in context.
What sets it apart: Lesche stands out by treating ancient Greek culture through the working methods of scholars: marginal notes, papyri, seals, looms, experiments, and unresolved questions. Its conversations show how evidence is handled, not just what conclusions have been reached.
In Greek antiquity a lesche (λέσχη) was a spot to hang out and chat. Here Brown University professor Johanna Hanink hosts conversations with fellow Hellenists about their latest work in the field.
Pandora's loom meets Roman renovation overruns, giving your classics brain something livelier than footnotes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A clear guide to scholia and the scholarly traditions around the Iliad.
The episode frames scholia as a practical entry point into ancient scholarly traditions, with Eleanor Dickey's 2007 Ancient Greek Scholarship serving as a useful guide to why they matter.
Ancient seals become a lens for thinking about image-making, authority, and transmission.
This episode keeps seals at the center, but it uses them to open out into painting, power, and the long life of images. The story of Protogenes, Apelles, and the sponge that made the foam memorable is a sharp entry point into a larger question: an image can be known as much for…
A thoughtful look at textiles as labor, sound, and a way to rethink history.
Textiles are framed here as part of how history, labor, and time can be understood differently. Johanna Hanning and Marie-Louise Nosch make a convincing case that clothing was never just decoration, but something that helped shape civilization through the largely unseen work of…
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
Lesky host Johanna Hanink interviews Bill Beck, assistant professor at Indiana University, about his team's multi-volume translation of the ancient scolia (marginal commentary) to Homer's Iliad, following Beck's 2025 Cambridge volume covering books one and two.
Johanna Hennig opens with Pliny's story of Protogenes, Apelles, and the sponge that unexpectedly renders the foam on a dog's mouth.
["Johanna Hanning opens Lesky by setting Hesiod's Theogony, Genesis, and Marie-Louise Nosch's \"plant fiber age, wool age, polyester era\" counter-periodization against metal-based history.", "Nosch, who studied ancient Greek history in Nancy and Naples and later led the Danish National Research Foundation Center for Textile Research at the University of Copenhagen, grounds the argument in Linear B tablets from Knossos and Mycenae.", "The conversation moves through the annual peplos for Athena in Athens, the agricultural cycle of flax and wool, and a trireme sail estimate that comes out to about four years of full-time labor.", "It treats Homeric and tragic textiles as memory objects, from Penelope, Andromache, and Electra to frayed sanctuary dedications and grave cloth that can predate the burial itself."]
Johanna Hanick interviews Martin Nichols about How to Make a Home, a collection of 19 passages by 11 Roman poets and prose authors on houses, decoration, and domestic life.
Emily Hauser explains how Penelope’s Bone uses Homeric women, Late Bronze Age archaeology, DNA, and fiction to rethink whose histories are visible.