Mark Masterson
Adjunct Research Fellow
School of Languages and Cultures
Mark Masterson was Associate Professor of Classics at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand (retired 2025). His major research interest is same-sex desire between men in classical antiquity and medieval Byzantium. His book Between Byzantine Men: Desire, Brotherhood, and Male Culture in the Medieval Empire will appear from Routledge in June 2022. He published Man to Man: Desire, Homosociality and Authority in Late-Roman Manhood (Ohio, 2014) and was one of three editors of Sex in Antiquity: Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World(Routledge, 2014). Mark has also published a number of articles and book chapters on sex and desire between men in the ancient and medieval worlds. He is currently completing a short book on queer theory and writing about the Byzantine Empire and is under contract with Liverpool University Press to produce a translation of the letters of the tenth-century Byzantine political figure, Nikephoros Ouranos. For more information, go here: https://hcommons.org/members/mmaarrkk/
Latest publications
- 2024. “Toxic Masculinity as a Lens for Middle Byzantium: The Case of Nikephoros II Phokas” in Toxic Masculinity in the Ancient World. Melanie Racette-Campbell and Aven McMaster, eds., Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press. 64-79.
- 2023. “Kinaidos: The Afterlife of a Term in the Byzantine Empire” in Searching for the Cinaedus in Classical Antiquity. Tommaso Gazzarri and Jesse Weiner, eds., Leiden: Brill. 274-298.
- 2022. Between Byzantine Men: Desire, Homosociality, and Brotherhood in the Medieval Empire, Routledge.
- 2019. “Nikephoros Ouranos, Eunuchism, and Masculinity during the Reign of Emperor Basil II,” Byzantion 89: 397-419.
- 2019. “Revisiting the Bachelorhood of Basil II” in The Emperor in the Byzantine World: Papers from the Forty-Eighth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies. Shaun Tougher, ed. London: Routledge. 52-82.