Click on the links below to read the statements from candidates for each office. The statements submitted by candidates address the following issues: (1) what each candidate hopes to achieve and contribute to the Society if elected; (2) what activities and experiences qualify the candidates for the positions for which they are standing. Candidates were also asked for links to online CVs or the text of brief resumes.
Please note that the Nominating Committee slate has only three candidates rather than four, since one candidate has withdrawn owing to ill health. Candidates are listed in the order in which they appear on the electronic ballot.
- Board of Directors
- Nominating Committee
- Program Committee
- President-Elect
- Vice President for Communications and Outreach
- Goodwin Award Committee
Board of Directors
John Gruber-Miller
Edwin R. and Mary E. Mason Professor of Languages, Cornell College (Iowa)
As SCS completes its Sesquicentennial, it is a time to look backward and forward. As we look back, we should certainly celebrate our accomplishments and we should look forward to how we can make our society more welcoming and inclusive.
I see three areas for expanding classics’ reach to make the study of the ancient world more accessible and inviting. First, I would l like to foster a dialogue between graduate programs and local undergraduate and secondary programs. Such a dialogue could develop through on-campus visits, class observations, brief internships, and local, day-long conferences so that grad students are better prepared to understand the expectations of teaching at an undergraduate institution, community college, or high school.
Second, I would like for the SCS Board of Directors and other elected officers to be more representative of our profession: early, mid, and late career; secondary, undergraduate, and graduate faculty; all geographical regions; broader ethnic, racial, gender, and first gen representation. Third, I will push the SCS to find ways to support the teaching of Latin and Greek and improve graduate student teacher preparation. Reaching new students through good teaching and better materials is the future of our profession.
In my teaching career, I have been committed to improving the teaching of Latin and Greek and integrating culture, diversity, and social justice into my classroom. As author of the website Ariadne, I have designed dozens of resources for students of Beginning Ancient Greek to understand fifth century Athens through others’ eyes—women, slaves, and foreigners. As Vice-President of the American Classical League, I have endeavored to expand the program of our annual Institute to include all voices. As Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Teaching Classical Languages, I have mentored both experienced and first-time authors to share their research with other Latin and Greek teachers. As a member of the “Classics Tuning Project,” I have collaborated with my colleagues to identify and highlight the benefits of studying Greek and Latin languages and cultures. As Chair of the Cornell College Diversity Committee, I have worked to bring about structural changes to make the campus climate more diverse and inclusive. I hope to share my experience at Cornell College and in multiple classical organizations with SCS to help it continue to be innovative and responsive to our changing world.
Editor, When Dead Tongues Speak: Teaching Beginning Greek and Latin (Oxford 2006). Author: “The Standards as Integrative Learning,” TCL 9.1 (2018) 19-38; “Six Categories for Assessing the Representation of Women in Textbooks,” Cloelia n.s. 4 (2014) 24-27; “Engaging Multiple Literacies through Remix Practices: Vergil Recomposed,” TCL 4.2 (2013) 141-60. Service: ACL-SCS Task Force on Standards for Latin Teacher Preparation (2010); the ACL-SCS Task Force for the Revision of the Standards for Classical Language Learning (2017); and the SCS Committee on Education.
Outreach is already doing a good job with its blog, Classics Everywhere, and Outreach and Forum Prizes for promoting Develop materials both scholarly and accessible that speak to a more diverse audience—make the classics relevant to our students and tot the public at large.
Jennifer Sheridan Moss
Associate Professor, Wayne State University
The SCS has had little representation among its leadership from schools such as mine, i.e. those without Ph.D. programs and completely without administrative support. A large number of classicists (tenure stream and contingent), however, are employed under these conditions, and more are kept from employment because our institutions are effectively phasing Classics out of the curriculum. If elected to the Board, I hope to give voice to those of us who fear for the future of classics at our institutions by focusing some of the Society’s time and effort toward our needs, such as devoting Annual Meeting sessions to the reframing of Classics curricula.
I have extensive experience in both the financial and programmatic aspects of scholarly societies. I have been active in the American Society of Papyrologists (ASP) throughout my career. I was the Secretary-Treasurer for six years, a member-at-large of the Board of Directors for two, and President for six; I now serve as immediate Past President. During my tenure as President the ASP engaged in a capital campaign and made significant changes to its publication program. While Secretary-Treasurer of the ASP in the 1990s, I also sat on the board of Scholars Press during a capital campaign.
https://clasprofiles.wayne.edu/profile/aa2191
Christopher Nappa
Professor, Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota
The most important role directors can play at the moment is active engagement with members of the profession broadly defined, including students; college and university faculty at all levels, including contingent and non-tenure-track faculty members; K-12 teachers; and people who maintain an active, but non-professional, interest in antiquity. Thus the board should be prepared not only to respond to events and queries but to continuously formulate a vision of the field and its members. That vision must address the realities of the world today rather than simply focus on an idealized past. This means working to find meaningful ways to diversify both the individuals who make up the field and the subjects we study (and how we do so). Moreover, Classicists must once again find ways to be a part of public discourse rather than occasional commentators on it. A number of scholars have made great strides in this direction, but it still remains a minority position. The SCS needs to play a greater role in these efforts even as it maintains its long-standing emphasis on strong research.
As a faculty member at a very large public land-grant university in the Midwest, I am accustomed to a group of students who are diverse in economic status, racial and ethnic background, gender and sexual identity, and religion. These are the same distinctions that Classics as a field must learn to navigate. My department includes scholars of the ancient Near East, Judaism, Christian origins, and now Islam, as well as classical antiquity as traditionally defined, and this mix has been of great value in shaping my approach to diverse studies of the ancient world. I have served as Director of Undergraduate Studies for 5 years; Director of Graduate Studies for 2 years; and Chair for 7 years. For the SCS, I have been a member of the Committee on Placement (for which I coauthored a webpage on approaching the job search) as well as a member and chair of the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups. From 2005 to 2008, I was the book review editor for the Classical Journal. I have regularly participated in outreach, especially to K-12 students and teachers, including professional development presentations. At my home institution I have been a member of committees exploring options and problems in language education and awarding research funding. I have attended every joint meeting of the SCS and AIA since 1993.
CV: https://cla.umn.edu/about/directory/profile/cnappa
Three representative publications:
Aspects of Catullus’ Social Fiction (Frankfurt 2001)
Reading after Actium: Vergil’s Georgics, Octavian, and Rome (Ann Arbor 2005)
Making Men Ridiculous: Juvenal and the Anxieties of the Individual (Ann Arbor 2018)
Corinne Pache
Professor of Classical Studies, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas
My main contribution to the SCS’s board of directors would be to bring the perspective of someone who has experienced classics in a range of different settings and who currently teaches at a small liberal arts institution. As a first generation student who only entered college in my late twenties, I knew nothing about the world of academia—and certainly nothing of that mysterious field known as classical studies. Some twenty-five years later, I have a better sense of the challenges facing our discipline at different kinds of institutions and especially in the culture at large. I have always wanted to see a more interactive SCS in terms of classicists interacting with each other and with the outside world, in ways both formal and informal—and not just at the annual meeting. I’m particularly interested in encouraging members to connect with others from different kinds of institutions (there’s often a sense of disconnect between those who teach at R1s and those who teach in smaller private colleges or larger public institutions), and to reach out to diverse publics, such as the media, public libraries, veteran groups, and high schools. In a culture that relentlessly focuses on the present and the quantifiable, it is up to us to make ourselves visible and relevant to contemporary and future generations.
I have previously served on the SCS Program Committee (2011-2014) and on many departmental and university committees. The most relevant experience for the position of director is my two years as acting chair of a department of Classical Studies and my service on a Campus Master Plan Committee, which tackled the competing priorities for space under a new strategic plan. My work with the Homer Multitext Project has also taught me a lot about productive collaboration between different institutions and multi-generational scholars, including undergraduate students. These experiences have given me a better understanding of different types of organizations and new perspectives on the needs and challenges of classical studies in the 21st century, especially as it positions itself within a new ecosystem of grants, fund-raising, research, and public discourse.
Bronwen Wickkiser
Associate Professor of Classics, Wabash College
Statement: I feel strongly that the future of Classics as an academic discipline depends upon education at the undergraduate level. This is where many faculty are thinking creatively about diversity and inclusion. We must. As chair of a Classics department at a small college in the Midwest, I work hard to make sure that my department sustains itself and even grows. (I had 17 students in Beginning Ancient Greek this past fall, five of them students of color, out of an all-male student body of fewer than 900. I would like to recruit these numbers consistently, and I am committed to figuring out how.) As we all know, sustaining and growing a Classics program requires a concerted and varied effort to convince students to take our courses, to educate them about what “Classics” is as an academic discipline, and to help them understand the value of Classics as especially good preparation for a wide range of professions, as well as being a strong foundation for living a good life. This work is rewarding yet also enormously time consuming, and SCS could be doing more to help us in all of these efforts.
If elected to the Board, I will have in mind what SCS can do to support outreach and to support teaching and retention, particularly of at-risk students. SCS round-tables are a useful complement to paper panels, but we need, for instance, more venues at the meetings for conversations about teaching, retention, and outreach, more funding to support and recognize excellence in these efforts, and better SCS networks for sharing practices. Directly relevant to expanding the reach and relevance of Classics is the need for greater diversity among the ranks of both graduate students and faculty. These are pressing and complex issues, for which I have no easy solutions, but I will listen, speak, and vote on the Board with a commitment to making our field more accessible and inclusive.
Relevant experience: Female; First generation graduate student; Assistant Professor: Gustavus Adolphus College (2003-07), Vanderbilt University (2007-13), Wabash College (2013-16); Associate Professor, Wabash (2016-); Chair of the Classics Department, Wabash (2017-); SCS legate (2017); Mellon Pedagogy Leadership Fellow, Wabash (2019-20, to increase retention in introductory-level courses; my project will focus on retention in Beginning Greek); Women’s Classical Caucus mentor (2017-); CAMWS Membership Committee (2011-13); SCS Coffin Traveling Fellowship Committee (2011-2014, Chair 2013-14); ASCSA Managing Committee (2004-); ASCSA Committee on Committees (elected, 2006-08).
Curriculum vitae: https://www.wabash.edu/facstaff/profiles/Wickkiser%20vita.pdf
Nominating Committee
C. W. (Toph) Marshall
Professor of Greek, University of British Columbia (Department of Classical, Near Eastern, and Religious Studies).
If elected to the Nominating Committee, my priority would be to focus on increasing participation from less senior colleagues in the governance of the SCS. Increasing diversity (broadly understood) is obviously part of that, but it is similarly important to diversify the age profile of those undertaking leadership positions. In light of the realities of the job market, this also includes recognizing the incorporation of individuals not pursuing a traditional academic career. I have been active in the Society of Classical Studies for more than 25 years, and have taught at several public universities across Canada. My primary concern with the SCS has been to make the organization increasingly receptive to the needs of emerging scholars, addressing hierarchies and inequalities that (perhaps inevitably) exist in our profession. I have worked to encourage new research, especially in reception and performance studies, and to make the experience of the annual meetings more supportive for those early in their careers.
I have experience with many aspects of the Society of Classical Studies across many divisions, having served on the Committee on the Performance of Classical Texts (1993-96), the Committee on Ancient and Modern Performance (2001-04, chair 03-04), the Committee on Outreach (2004-07), the Committee on Research (2007-11), the Outreach Prize Committee (2009-11, chair 10-11), the Committee on Placement (2013-16, chair 14-16), the Professional Matters Committee (2014-16 ex officio), and the Executive Director Search Committee (2015-16). I have organized or co-organized panels at the APA and SCS with the LCC, WCC, Committee on Outreach, CAMP, SORGLL, and as an individual; four of these have led to edited or co-edited academic collections. Since 2002 I have directed or acted in eight CAMP performances and in two other conference performances. In 2016 I was invited to speak in the Presidential Panel on contingent labor in the profession. I have also held various offices in the Classical Association of Canada (1998-2012) and served as the Academic Director of the International Comic Arts Forum (2010-16).
http://cnrs.ubc.ca/people/cw-marshall/
Patrice Rankine
Professor of Classics, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, University of Richmond
If elected, I hope to add some depth and perspective on diversity and inclusion at SCS. I was contacted subsequent to the January SCS meeting, where the need for such depth and perspective became painfully apparent. I do not presume that there is any particular lack at SCS or that my appointment to this committee would suddenly fix the problem. I simply agreed to the request that I stand for nomination, and I appreciated the committee and SCS’s sense of urgency and identification of those with some experiences to add to the conversation.
Everything in my academic career is experience to serve on this committee. Not only am I a lifelong faculty member who has served on several faculty committees at Purdue University, but I also became an academic dean six years ago, where a good part of my work has to do with adding perspectives on diversity and inclusion and processes that facilitate our collective, desired outcomes. Listening and working collaboratively will be more important to me than any particular outcome; process supersedes ends and, in the end, lead to the desired ends.
Nancy Worman
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Classics, Barnard College; Director of Graduate Studies, Columbia University
I see my duty on the Nominating Committee as helping to insure diversity in major committee positions, including both a balance of women and men and Classicists from diverse backgrounds (including racial and class as well as gender / orientation). Indeed, I would aim at a majority of such candidates in prominent positions, as a means of modeling inclusion at all levels of the Society for those just entering the field and for those who have not been properly enfranchised in the past. As a corollary of this, I would look to support SCS members on committees who have progressive attitudes toward our discipline and its boundaries, which are in fact interdisciplinary by convention if not always in spirit and outlook. By this I mean especially those who foster approaches beyond philology and its traditional modes (e.g., word studies, intertextuality) to innovative theoretical and comparative interventions, reception and cultural studies, and the expanding of the conventional "Greco-Roman" rubric to include Northern Africa and the Near East. At this crucial junction in the history of our discipline, and with the Humanities more generally in peril, we need to move forward in the most positive and open-minded ways possible.
While I have not held any prominent position on an SCS committee before now, I have sat on the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (as was) and have been previously nominated for a position (I think on the Program Committee). I have held a number of institutional leadership roles, including (most relevantly) heading the Faculty Governance Committee at Barnard, which oversees the committee roles and membership, the Faculty Meetings, and Barnard rules and procedures more generally. I have held this role in repeated cycles, off and on since 2002. I have also been Chair of the Barnard Department of Classics and Ancient Studies and the Barnard Program in Comparative Literature, off and on since before tenure (in 2005). I have sat on committees overseeing graduate procedures and exams in the Columbia Department of Classics (again off and on over the years), and am now headed into my third year as Director of Graduate Studies.
Nancy Worman is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Classics at Barnard College, Director of Graduate Studies at Columbia University, and affiliated with Barnard's Program in Comparative Literature and Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research focuses on style and the body in performance in classical Greek drama and its reception, as well as rhetoric and ancient and modern literary criticism and theory. She has published books and articles on these topics, including most recently Landscape and the Spaces of Metaphor in Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism (Cambridge 2015) and Virginia Woolf’s Greek Tragedy (Bloomsbury 2019). She is currently finishing a book-length project entitled Embodiment, Materiality, and the Edges of the Human in Greek Tragedy, which is forthcoming from Bloomsbury and with Joy Connolly is editing the Oxford Handbook on Ancient Literary Theory and Criticism.
Program Committee
Beth Severy-Hoven
Professor of the Classical Mediterranean and Middle East, Macalester College
If elected, I will emphasize in my work the Society’s commitment to making the field open to scholars of all backgrounds. At the level of the program of the Annual Meeting, such fostering of diversity can be addressed by welcoming a broad range of approaches and materials. New methodologies should be given the benefit of the doubt, and we should put at the center of our program that which has been historically marginalized, from subdisciplines like pedagogy to people such as the enslaved.
The experiences which qualify me for a position on the Program Committee are varied and numerous. I have published both a monograph (Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire, Routledge, 2003) and a textbook (The Satyrica of Petronius, Oklahoma, 2014), and I work with materials as diverse as literature, coins, epigraphy and wall painting; feminist film theory and the intersection of slavery and sexuality; and the web-based sharing of teaching materials. In my previous work for the SCS, I have focused on diversity and equity in the field through the Committee on the Status of Women and Minorities (2001-2004), the Pearson Fellowship Committee (2004-2007) and the Placement Committee (2013-2016). In addition to reviewing scholarship for a variety of presses, journals and institutions, I served on the Bolchazy Pedagogy Prize Committee for CAMWS from 2015 to 2018. Finally, through a National Endowment for the Humanities grant directed by Matt Panciera, I have had the pleasure of working with K-12 teachers during two summer workshops on Roman Daily Life. I believe these and other experiences have given me a broad sense of the diverse audiences and domains of knowledge within our field, as well as where we need to do better.
For more information about me, please see my faculty page on the Macalester website: https://www.macalester.edu/classics/facultystaff/bethseveryhoven/.
Melissa Mueller
Ph.D. University of California, Berkeley; Associate Professor of Classics, UMass Amherst
The SCS Program Committee has in recent years diversified both the content and format of its presentations: six-minute Lightning Talks were added last year, and the program also included round tables, posters, and workshops. Over the past two years, we’ve seen a Presidential Panel on alternative career paths for Classics Ph.D.s as well as a panel on “The Future of Classics,” both reflecting the fact that as sustainable, full-time teaching positions continue to disappear, the “face” of Classics itself is changing; we must think critically about who we are, and want to be. If elected, I would work towards a program that speaks to the interests and commitments of a wider range of careers stages and institutional affiliations. I would also bring an open mind to my reading of abstracts and proposal submissions, recognizing that it is in part the job of the Program Committee to allow previously unexplored, or marginalized, topics and configurations of papers to emerge.
I have been attending the annual meetings since 1999. I haven’t been asked to do any service for the SCS until now, but I am a frequent reviewer of article submissions, book manuscripts, and proposals for journals and presses. I have taught at four different colleges/ universities since receiving my Ph.D., in certain cases as contingent faculty. My experiences in these different roles has served as a valuable reminder throughout my career not to generalize from my own (privileged) position to the field at large.
Three representative publications
- Objects as Actors: Props and the Poetics of Performance in Greek Tragedy (Chicago, 2016)
- “The Politics of Gesture in Sophocles’ Antigone,” Classical Quarterly (2011) 61.2: 412-425.
- “Sappho and Sexuality,” forthcoming in the Cambridge Companion to Sappho, edited by P.J. Finglass and A. Kelly.
CV: https://www.umass.edu/
Carlos Noreña
Chair, Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology, Associate Professor of History University of California, Berkeley
I love the annual meeting. It is an opportunity to catch up with old friends and make new ones, and to learn about the latest work in the many fields and subfields included in our big tent. Every year, without fail, I come away from the meeting overflowing with new ideas for my own teaching and research. If elected to the Program Committee, I would work with the other members of the committee to make sure that everyone, from first-time attendees to senior scholars, has the best chance to have that sort of enriching experience. My inclination would be to expand, not contract: more papers, more panels, more events, more formats. Above all, I would aim to maximize diversity on the program. We are manifestly better off, both as individual scholars and as a discipline, when exposed to and informed by a multiplicity of topics, approaches, perspectives, and voices. The program of the annual meeting should always exemplify the Society’s mutually reinforcing values of diversity, inclusion, and excellence, and as a member of the Program Committee, I would take very seriously the responsibility to promote precisely those core values.
I attended my first (then) APA meeting in a particularly frigid Chicago in 1997 and have only missed three annual meetings in the intervening years. I have given a number of papers on panels ranging from a Sunday afternoon session with audience members numbering in the single digits to a lively Presidential Panel on interdisciplinarity. As an organizer, I have sought to promote newer formats, including a Debate (“The End of the Roman Empire: Catastrophe and Collapse vs. Transition and Transformation”) and a Seminar (submitted for the 2020 meeting). At Berkeley, I have helped to organize two major international conferences, and have learned a lot about pacing, sequencing, and curating a shared intellectual and social experience for large groups of scholars and students. Drawing on these experiences, both as a speaker and as an organizer, I would work to assemble a program for the annual meeting that had something for everyone, and that showcased the very best of what it is we do.
https://history.berkeley.edu/carlos-f-norena
Alex Purves
Professor of Classics, UCLA
President-Elect
Mary-Kay Gamel
Research Professor Emerita of Classics, Comparative Literature, and Theater Arts, University of California, Santa Cruz
I would be especially interested to encourage members to consider ways to bring classical texts alive. My world was changed in 1984 when an undergraduate theater major asked me to translate Medea for a performance he wanted to create. In the years between then and now I was involved in many productions of scripts by all the ancient playwrights, and gradually began writing adaptations rather than translations, in the process defining different kinds of “authenticity” in staging ancient drama. I strongly believe that this methodology does not just change language but transforms a text into a new medium, one in which every decision made in a production is part of the translation, offering a broader range of opportunities to classical studies. It can also inspire new responses to classical texts by both performers and audience.
I received my M.A. in Classics from Harvard and my PhD in Comparative Literature from UC Berkeley.
I have created translations and adaptations of fourteen ancient dramas including Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes; these were staged between 1985 and 2015 in many different locations. Some recent publications are: “Revising ‘Authenticity’ in Staging Ancient Mediterranean Drama,” Theorising Performance Reception, ed. Edith Hall and Stephe Harrop (Duckworth, 2010): 153-170; and “Translation and/in Performance,” Adapting Translation for the Stage, ed. Geraldine Brodie and Emma Cole (Routledge. 2017): 118-134. I am currently creating a website which when complete will feature scripts, videos, and comments on various plays I have translated and staged. For a preview see https://mkgamel.sites.ucsc.edu
Shelley P. Haley
The Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies; Chair, Classics Department, Hamilton College
As you are aware, I was nominated by petition to be a candidate for President Elect of the Society. In my reflections to stand for this position, I was clear about one thing: I wanted to represent the needs and concerns of the many members who signed my petition. I reached out to a few to learn what they, as members of SCS, wanted to see the Society achieve under my leadership, should I be elected. I was blown away by the heartfelt responses and sincere gratitude for being asked. Here is the platform I put together from these responses; the items are not listed in order of importance.
- Be more inclusive of and build stronger relationships with Middle- and Secondary school teachers. These educators build our pipeline; the Society needs to break through academic snobbery to help our colleagues in Middle and Secondary School Latin programs build and sustain their programs and fight against tracking and other detrimental practices.
- Be more forceful about acknowledging not only the racist and white supremacist history of Classics in the United States but also the legacy of classicists who triumphed over those evils. Everyone should know about Richard Greener, William S. Scarborough, Edward W. Blyden as well as Mary Jane Patterson, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Anna Julia Cooper
- Be more proactive and visible in supporting colleagues of color and of other marginalized groups in the field and in developing more robust outreach programs to appeal to underrepresented groups in Classics. The Minority Scholarship is wonderful but as one of my supporters said, one is not enough! Also, I would advocate for a name change (I am NOT a minority). I would like to see this program renamed for Frank Snowden, Jr. (the first person of African descent elected to the presidency of the then-APA); then develop other scholarship/fellowship opportunities with at least one named for Anna Julia Cooper.
- Expand the membership form to include optional questions on racial/ethnic identity; also redo the gender options: “male”, “female” and “transgender” are simply inadequate.
- There was a request for some kind of SCS oversight committee that would hold departments accountable when there are complaints about racist or sexist or anti-LGBTQ harassment. I believe this should not be relegated just to one committee (like Professional Matters) but there should be more than one place where survivors of these kinds of harassment can seek redress.
- There was a request to update the SCS website to make it more functional, user friendly and one that speaks to the issues of today, such as funding and equity.
I am realistic, as were many of the members who replied, that I cannot possibly do any of these items alone and certainly not in a one-year term! However, the thread running through each of these planks is a deep yearning for CHANGE from people who care deeply about the Society. As a Black feminist who has been in the field for over forty years, I believe I can at least start us on the path of change.
As a young student in junior high school, my life was saved and I was transformed by my Latin teacher. I was an introverted, sad, motherless young Black woman, lonely and isolated as the only girl of color in my junior and senior high school. I often say I would have been a teenage suicide statistic, had it not been for the kindness, support, and love of my Latin teacher, Mrs. June LeRay (now Bates). I never intended to be a Latin teacher; I was going to be the fulfillment of my grandmother’s dream and be an elementary school teacher. But Mrs. LeRay helped me fall in love with Latin and she was my role model for the kind of educator I wanted to be.
In graduate school at the University of Michigan, I had to develop an even thicker skin against the barbs of racial micro-aggressions and overt racist actions. As I watched the few women faculty (all white, of course) navigate the pitfalls of sexism, I discovered that whiteness trumps any sort of global “sisterhood” and gender sameness did not mean solidarity. All these lessons helped me in my various positions at Luther College, Howard University, UC Irvine and finally Hamilton College. Whenever I was appointed Chair of a department, whether Classics or Africana Studies, I turned back to my experiences to help me fashion a management style that is gentle but firm, demanding accountability and responsibility, but never micromanaging.
I have been president of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, after first serving as 1st and 2nd vice-president of the Association. As a result, I have experience presiding over a Board of Directors. I have served as Chief Reader for the AP Latin Program and Chair of the AP Latin Development Committee. I believe I am a patient manager but do not brook recalcitrance. Substance is more important to me than optics.
Finally, I am proud to be a Black woman who is a professor of Classics. I was thrilled to receive the SCS’s award for Excellence in Teaching—Collegiate Level for 2017. But I am a Black woman; everything I have achieved, I have achieved as a Black woman. I am so disappointed that nowhere in my citation for the teaching award is there any mention of my race!
I remember how proud I felt when Frank Snowden was elected president of SCS and how devastated I was both for him and the Society when he was unable to serve because of ill-health. Nevertheless, it was he who planted the seed that one day, perhaps, I could be elected president of the Society. Over the years I have not always been proud to be a member of SCS; in fact, I left the APA for a number of years, feeling that there was no place for the likes of me in the organization. Eventually I came back now I want to see SCS thrive. But I sincerely believe that can only happen through a change towards welcoming inclusivity. That is the change I want to bring to the Society.
Sarah Iles Johnston
College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Religion and Professor of Classics and Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University.
Two issues are vital. The first is how the SCS can continue to find ways to include members of groups that are underrepresented. I would work closely with the SCS Committee on Diversity in the Profession to rethink previous strategies and better address problems that have long existed. The second issue is flagging student enrollments. We need to continuously develop new pedagogical methods and improve those that we already have, particularly in lecture courses. We also need to more fully come to terms with the fact that today’s students have interests in the ancient world that are different from those that many of us had. For example, courses in (1) ancient Greek and Roman religions and early Christianity; and (2) the reception and reworking of classical texts, now enroll well at universities and colleges that have developed them. We need to sponsor more sessions at the annual meeting that explore the ways that we can change our course offerings, as well as our teaching methods, in order to remain a healthy discipline—indeed, to survive.
I have served in leadership capacities at many levels for several organizations, which have acquainted me with the challenges of bringing diverse groups of people together to make decisions. For the SCS, I served on the Editorial Board for Monographs, the Program Committee and the Board of Directors (as an at-large member). I also served as a member of the board of directors for the Women’s Classical Caucus; as the president-elect and then president of the American Society for the Study of Religion; and as founding member and later chair of the ‘Europe and the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity’ subgroup of the Society for Biblical Studies. At my university, I was the founding director of our Center for the Study of Religion and have served in a number of other offices for my department and university.
Vice President for Communications and Outreach
Alison Futrell
Associate Professor and Head, Department of History, University of Arizona
I embrace current initiatives under the purview of Outreach; indeed, I’ve been involved in several such efforts (see below). I think “Classics Everywhere” is a terrific idea for fostering enthusiasm about the ancient Mediterranean and expanding our community beyond the academy through live events; I’d like to see more details about funded projects available on SCS social media, to offer inspiration and potential contacts for colleagues contemplating reaching out in their own way. I’d also encourage the SCS to continue to celebrate what may be categorized as digital scholarship, particularly projects that are inherently more public-facing and accessible to non-specialists. I would hope to continue boosting the dynamic and visual appeal of the SCS website, as well as support its ongoing usability with page updates, fresh links, etc.
I live to serve! My committee work for the SCS (and APA) includes stints on the Committee on the Classical Tradition (which I chaired), the Committee for Outreach, the Outreach Prize Committee (which I chaired), and the Committee for Ancient and Modern Performance. I’ve been part of the yearly CAMP performance for eleven productions. I’ve strongly advocated embracing a musical component for these, as was particularly evident in my libretto work on Thesmophoriazousai (2011), Alcestis (2013), and Rudens (2014); the latter I also produced and directed (with John Givens). My local outreach efforts have often been structured around the Tucson chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America. I’ve taken a leadership role in expanding our calendar of activities to include events, such as Roman Spectacle re-enactments and panel discussions of archaeology adventure movies, sustained by our ancient-themed “Food for Thought” snacks; these efforts have been supported by Society Grants awarded by AIA national, which enfolded our “Food for Thought” initiative into one of their fundraising efforts. I was the recipient of the AIA Annual Foot Soldier award in 2012, granted specifically for local outreach service. I’ve been on the national lecture circuit for the AIA a number of times, most recently as the Martha Sharp Joukowsky Lecturer for 2018-2019. (These have been excellent opportunities to meet colleagues throughout North America and exchange ideas about engaging with our various communities.) I served as co-chair for the Women’s Classical Caucus and am currently its Secretary-Treasurer. I’ve been on the program committee of CAMWS for the past five years.
https://history.arizona.edu/user/alison-futrell
John D. Muccigrosso
Professor of Classics, Drew University
The Communications and Outreach Division of SCS is responsible for "promoting a wider public understanding and appreciation of Classics;" “strengthen[ing] the SCS's ability to communicate with a broadly constituted audience.” In recent years great strides have been made by the Society in this area. If elected, I would first build on the successes of the Division and look to continuing committee members for their input on how we can continue this good work, but also expand upon it. There are a growing number of classics-related social-media and internet resources with which we should continue to increase our connections. We need to make sure that our communication policies reflect our values and also make sense administratively. Ours is not the only scholarly society to be dealing (not always effectively) with the challenges of a changing society and legacies of inequality. We cannot reductively put all the blame for these problems on poor communication, but we must also acknowledge that this Division can help be part of our remedy. Good communication creates channels that are not just one-way.
In my twenty years as a Classics faculty member at a small school, I have always been concerned with how we spread the news about our field and make its benefits evident to non-specialist audiences. In grad school and shortly thereafter I was very involved with the ACL (as perhaps its first webmaster, back in the early internet days of the last century). I continue to believe that our success lies in thinking of ourselves as a broad community of specialized scholars, teachers, students, and interested non-specialists (and those groups are overlapping). The divide between K-12 and university-level classics education is too large and my own work in Latin paedagogy reminded me of how artificial it is. I have been active on social media, promoting my own work and the work of others in scholarly areas of interest to me. Finally I have had significant administrative experience in higher education.
Goodwin Award Committee
Shadi Bartsch
Shadi Bartsch, Helen A Regenstein Distinguished Service Professor of Classics, The University of Chicago.
Although the selection of the Goodwin Award books may not seem to contribute directly to the welfare of the SCS, these three volumes stand as something of a statement about where Classics as a field is, the kind of scholarship it produces at its best, and why Classics is topical, relevant, and important to all of us in the modern world, whether we consider ourselves part of the classical inheritance or not. The Goodwin Award books have the potential to demonstrate all the richly different ways in which classical texts can be read, with and against the grain, as an explanation for how the West has ended up where it is, and much more.
I’m deeply immersed in the scholarship in our field, across the Greek-Roman (non)-divide. I’ve published studies that touch on culture, philosophy, literature, reception, and other topics, and edited companion studies that spanned the gamut from archeology to film. I’ve twice been editor of CP and currently edit a journal called KNOW. I chaired the faculty board of the University of Chicago Press. I’m broad-minded and inquisitive, but respect all parts of our field, from philology to reception studies. I am a past winner of the Goodwin Award. Perhaps more importantly, I read voraciously and would read each candidate cover to cover with great interest.
Online CV: https://chicago.academia.edu/
Harriet Flower
Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics, Department of Classics, Princeton University
It would be a special honor for me to be able to serve on the committee for the SCS' annual Goodwin Award. One of the main reasons I enjoy going to the SCS annual meeting is to see the book display. The opportunity to consider what is new and emerging in our field(s) is an exceptional privilege.
I am not able to offer any special qualifications other than a lifetime spent as a reader and teacher. I am also the author of 4 monographs and editor of two collected volumes of essays. I am working on another monograph and am presently co-editing a new collection of essays.
Here is a link to my web profile and CV: https://classics.princeton.edu/people/faculty/core/harriet-flower