A flash Fall 2020 speaker series “at” UW-Madison

How and to what ends does classical antiquity remain relevant today? How have racism, sexism, and Eurocentrism shaped its study and perceptions? And how can we more accurately understand the multicultural realities of the ancient world and more effectively communicate them to modern publics?

These are questions many classicists ask ourselves on a daily basis — questions I use to frame my “Western Culture: Arts and Literature” undergrad survey (ILS 203). This fall, to my delight, students didn’t shy away from the problems I raised in my introductory lecture. …

This is the first of a two-part transcript of a conversation with Joy Connolly and Joseph Howley. Check out Part II for professional advice and resources for classics grad students.

On April 23, in response to the COVID-19 crisis, Joseph Howley, Associate Professor of Classics at Columbia University, convened a special Zoom session of the Graduate Research Colloquium featuring Joy Connolly, President of the American Council of Learned Societies. I was honored to join them in discussing the pandemic’s implications for higher ed, the humanities, and classics as a profession — from undergraduate teaching and outreach to graduate training, job…

This is the second of a two-part conversation with Joy Connolly and Joseph Howley during a special April 23 session of the Columbia University Graduate Research Colloquium convened in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Read the first part for introductions and big-picture thoughts on the future of higher ed.

Joseph, continuing from Part 1: This does take us into the next set of questions, which are basically about what’s going to happen to the job market and what should graduate students be doing about it.

Joy: The job market is going to be really rough these next couple of years…

Today marks eminent historian Erich Gruen’s 85th birthday, and the inauguration of the Society for Classical Studies’ first annual Gruen Prize for graduate research on cultural interactions in the ancient Mediterranean. (Submissions are due October 9, and a matching gift will double donations toward the prize endowment.) Like his myriad students, I owe Erich more than I can enumerate: training in how to think, trenchant critique, warm support both professional and personal, years of mentorship that have turned into cherished friendship. But one of his most lasting gifts to me has been my friendship with John Tully.

I first met…

April is over, and I see no lilacs in this dead land. My state university is off to a running start with slashing budgets. Mandatory furloughs — grad students are thankfully exempted — will mean more work for less pay in the months to come. Halfway through our department’s online “commencement” this week, Zoom cut out because we haven’t sprung for an institutional account. We couldn’t applaud or raise a glass or be together one last time with PhD students we’ve worked and taught with for six years, and not everyone was lucky enough to have future plans to report.

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“Together, apart.” This phrase is like a seesaw. Which word will tip the balance today? In glass-half-full moods, I tell myself this pandemic could recalibrate our selves and our societies. But as news breaks with fresh evidence of our division, the depression ahead, the ever-receding day when things bend back toward normal, my spirits slam the ground.

Last week was different. Last week something real and good and extraordinary began. On Thursday April 23, the Society for Classical Studies and the Women’s Classical Caucus joined forces to announce $15,000 in emergency COVID-19 relief funds to Classics grad students and contingent…

On a honeymoon safari in Tanzania two years ago, as my husband slept off a cold he caught on the plane, I spent fireside nights listening to lions roar and reading Out of Africa. This “lyrical meditation” by the Danish author Karen Blixen, writing under the name Isak Dinesen, looks back on her struggle to start a coffee plantation in early twentieth-century Kenya. The farm’s gradual failure, as her marriage and her lover’s Gipsy Moth biplane went up in flames, ultimately forced Blixen back to Europe. …

As the earth reawakens outside our closed doors and we livestream springtime rites of renewal, many of us are wondering: what will remain of Classics, what will we resurrect, when this plague recedes?

In the beginning, Ovid says, there was chaos. Then god and a better nature put the elements in their place; made waters, airs, lands, and creatures to inhabit them; then finally man — the only one that looks upward to the stars.