Rate My Professor Hannah Sorscher

Dr. Hannah Sorscher is a Lecturer in the Classics programme at the University of Otago. She earned her BA with departmental and college honors in Classical Studies from the University of Chicago in 2014, an MA in Classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2017, and a PhD in Classics from the same institution in 2021. Her doctoral dissertation, titled Pro filia, pro uxore: Young Women in the Conventional and Unconventional Families of Roman Comedy, was directed by Sharon L. James. Prior to her appointment at Otago, Sorscher held the position of Thesaurus Linguae Latinae Fellow at the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften in Munich (2024–2025), funded jointly by the Society for Classical Studies and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She served as Visiting Assistant Professor of Classics at Colby College (2023–2024), Assistant Professor at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (2022–2023), and Teach@Tübingen Fellow at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (2021–2022). Her teaching experience includes courses on Latin poetry, Roman comedy, women and warfare in the ancient Mediterranean, and daily life in ancient Rome at institutions in the United States, Germany, and Italy.

Sorscher's research focuses on classical philology and social history, particularly family relationships and women’s lived experiences in the ancient Mediterranean world, Latin poetry including Roman comedy, and the consequences of second-phase warfare for women and children in Greek and Latin literature. She is currently completing a monograph on families of choice in Roman comedy, exploring publicly staged relationships that challenge traditional patriarchal structures, as performed by playwrights Plautus and Terence. Her key publications include “Scattering Seeds: The Lyncus and Triptolemus Episode in Ovid’s Metamorphoses” in Classical Philology (2022) and “Astyanax’s Fate and Second-Phase Warfare in the Iliad” in The Body of the Combatant in the Ancient Mediterranean (2024). Forthcoming works encompass translations and introductory essays for Menander’s plays Aspis, Samia, Perikeiromene, and Epitrepontes in the University of Wisconsin Press series on Greek and Roman comedy. Sorscher has received awards such as the American Association of University Women Short-Term Research Publication Grant (2022–2023), the Epps Prize in Greek Studies (2020), and honorable mention for the Women’s Classical Caucus Best Pre-Ph.D. Paper Presentation Award (2020). She has delivered numerous presentations at conferences including the Society for Classical Studies annual meetings and the Classical Association of the Middle West and South.