Mark Masterson

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.