Erin M. Hanses

Dr. Erin M. Hanses is a scholar of classical languages and literature whose research focuses broadly on sex, gender, and identity in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Her published work to date has treated engagement with Epicurean philosophy among the Latin love elegists, in particular Sulpicia; gendered personifications of Nature in Vergil and Lucretius; and representations of female pleasure from ancient Greek medical texts to modern scientific studies. Her current book project, Recovering Sulpicia: Women, Poetry, and Power in Ancient Rome uses critical phenomenology as a framework and methodology for investigating the enigmatic figure of Sulpicia as it considers both the manifold possibilities for her identity as poet and her connectivity as literary persona with the other women of Roman elegy. At Penn State, she teaches courses on Roman civilization, history, and archaeology; on classical mythology, Greek civilization, and the Greco-Roman world; on sex, gender, and the body, from ancient Greece and Rome to modern America; and Latin language courses at all levels. She also regularly teaches Penn State students via summer study abroad in Rome.