In December 2021 I published a blog post with a hypothetical reading list for an 8-week graduate reading class on Greek history. That post served as a first draft of such a list with some notes about the list.

The imagined audience for this course is aspiring history teachers with little or no background in the classical languages. My goal was to construct a reading list that a) gives a glimpse at some of what I see as core issues to Greek history as they emerge in recent scholarship, b) challenges traditional narratives about Greek history, and c) avoids leaning too hard on literary or linguistic analysis.

This page is designed to archive and update that course list. It will be updated periodically.

  • Johanna Hanink, The Classical Debt (Harvard 2017)
  • Naoise Mac Sweeny, Foundation Myths and Politics in Ancient Ionia (Cambridge 2013)
  • Stephen Hodkinson, Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (Duckworth 2000)
  • David Yates, States of Memory (Oxford 2019)
  • Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Immigrant Women in Athens (Routledge 2014)
  • Kostas Vlassopoulos, Unthinking the Greek Polis (Cambridge 2007)
  • John Hyland, Persian Interventions (Johns Hopkins 2017)
  • David M. Lewis, Greek Slave Systems in their Eastern Mediterranean Context (Oxford 2018)

Also considered

  • Paul Kosmin, The Land of the Elephant Kings (Harvard 2014)
  • Kostas Vlassopoulos, Greeks and Barbarians (Cambridge 2013)
  • Joan Connelly, The Parthenon Enigma (Penguin 2014)
  • Jenny Roberts, The Plague of War (Oxford 2017)