Conference Addresses Need for Greater Diversity in Classics

Thinking about diversity in the discipline of Classics has often meant imagining who comprises the audience in our classrooms and at our lectures.

Addressing the changing demographics of the American academy and ensuring a racially and ethnically diverse pipeline are undoubtedly important in Classics and in many other fields, as the decision of the Society for Classical Studies to launch a new committee on diversity in the profession attests. But our discipline’s particular reputation—its perception as fundamentally exclusive and Eurocentric—demands even more.

We need to look beyond representation if the Classics is to play a transformative role in higher education going forward. Those interested in the Classics today must create a future where scholarship that is committed to deconstructing the universalizing pretensions of the field as a cornerstone of “Western civilization” and to engaging critically the complexities of race and ethnicity thrives. This work has only gained in urgency in the aftermath of Charlottesville, where neo-fascist appropriations of Classics to legitimate white supremacy took center stage.

A two-day conference on March 16 and 17 entitled “Racing the Classics” brings together scholars whose work on ancient Greek and Roman culture has demonstrated a thorough consideration of race, ethnicity, and intersectionality to workshop writing and to build a critical feedback network for future projects.

The conference is a Humanities Council Global Initiative with the Department of Classics, organized by Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Classics) and Sasha-Mae Eccleston (Brown) and co-sponsored by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies (PIIRS), Postclassicisms, and Brown University

Keynotes:

Emily Greenwood (Yale)
Patrice Rankine (Richmond)

Participants:

Rosa Andújar (King’s College London)

Harriet Fertik (New Hampshire)

Marcus Folch (Columbia)

Armando García ( UC Riverside)

Tom Hawkins (Ohio State)

Mathias Hanses (Penn State)

Rebecca Futo Kennedy (Denison)

Adam Lecznar (University College London)

Lyra Monteiro (Rutgers)