Click on the links below to read the statements from the candidates for each office.
The candidates were asked to address in their statements: (1) their experiences and qualifications relevant to the office for which they are standing; and (2) what they hope to contribute to SCS and achieve if elected. Candidates were also asked for links to online CVs or the CVs were uploaded to the SCS website. For the election slate and the Nominating Committee report, please visit the 2024 Election Slate page.
Voting will open in early August. The statements are listed in the order on which they will appear on the ballot.
Election Candidate Statements:
- President-Elect
- Vice President for Professional Matters
- Vice President for Program
- Vice President for Publications and Research
- Junior Financial Trustee
- Directors-at-large
- Graduate Student Director
- Contingent Faculty Director
- Nominating Committee
- Program Committee
- Goodwin Committee
- Committee on Professional Ethics
President-Elect
John F. Miller
Arthur F. and Marian W. Stocker Professor of Classics, University of Virginia
The SCS/APA has meant a lot to me through the years—friendships, the satisfaction of successful collaborations, abundant intellectual stimulation, and an award that proved important to my career. I am a longtime member and have attended every annual meeting but one since 1978. I have served in most of the Society’s divisions, including as Director of the Classics Advisory Service, VP for Program, VP for Professional Matters, and on various regular and ad hoc committees, both elected and appointed. During my two terms on the Board of Directors I participated in pivotal developments such as our metamorphosis from APA to SCS, the society’s embrace of outreach, and the redesign of the SCS divisions. My experience in leadership positions extends to my university and several other professional and community organizations. The Society and the landscape of higher education are in some ways different places since the last time that I was asked to make such a candidate statement, in the wake of the Pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, the 2017 racist riot in the town where I live, continuing fallout from the financial crisis of 2008, and the shocking events at our sesquicentennial convention in San Diego. We are much in the debt of the SCS leaders who have shepherded the organization through troubled times. But some big challenges need to be addressed for us to flourish, to realize the ambitious goals of increasing participation, fostering broad inclusion, and advocating for the field. I cannot claim to have ready answers but am willing to serve again for the maintenance and betterment of the Society.
The annual meeting is the most important thing that we do, and merits special attention even when we are not facing financial difficulties. The report by the recent Task Force has laid out principles, problems, and a set of priorities for discussion. I myself welcomed the return to in-person meetings and was really cheered by the heavy participation at most of the sessions that I attended in Chicago. During the Pandemic, the SCS put on totally virtual meetings that were a model of the kind, but if this became our format going forward, too much would be lost. Some like the idea of a hybrid convention for the sake of increased accessibility, a perennial concern that has rightly come to the forefront. But a fully hybrid modality is much more expensive and has so far had frequent technical glitches. There are of course other types of hybrid meeting allowing for more targeted participation. Another idea is to direct additional meeting funding rather to enabling more members without access to institutional funds to attend an in-person convention, another strategy for enhancing accessibility. As with the program, we will no doubt continue to experiment with the form of the meeting, guided by what we want and what we can afford. Frank discussion with our AIA partners is essential in this regard.
The SCS is a big tent, or should be. We classicists are fortunate to be trained as generalists, which allows us to talk to one another across areas of specialization much more readily than in most academic fields. This point was brought home to me powerfully when I served on the Program Committee, where five more or less randomly elected members could in spirited conversation competently adjudicate a wide range of proposals. My hope is that that spirit animates the Society, and attracts colleagues to join, or to rejoin after a time away. At the same time, we need, now more than ever before, to reach out to our sister organizations. I think in particular of the state and regional associations and organizations like ACL that foster K-12 teaching. It’s been my good fortune to have participated throughout my career in Virginia’s strong collaboration between higher-ed and K-12 teachers. There is mutual benefit in brainstorming about teaching Latin and how to invigorate Classics across the high school curriculum. We are all in it together.
The SCS President is something of a figurehead for his or her consular year, but in my observation can make a difference in many ways—to insure diversity of various sorts in the many appointments to committees, to insist on transparency in sharing discussions of the Board with the membership, to thank donors for their contributions, to help to maintain a tone of civility and a spirit of openness.
Thank you for your consideration.
Ralph Rosen
Vartan Gregorian Professor of the Humanities, Professor of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Experience and qualifications:
Over the past forty years I have taught a wide array of courses to a multitude of high school, undergraduate, postbaccalaureate, graduate and continuing education students. I have also held numerous and varied administrative positions not only within my own Department of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (Chair, Undergraduate Chair, Graduate Chair), but in Penn’s School of Arts and Sciences (Associate Dean for Graduate Education, overseeing 27 graduate programs across the School), in Liberal and Professional Studies programs, and in the undergraduate Residential Life system. I was also co-founder and Director of Penn’s interdisciplinary Center for Ancient Studies, a collaborative program involving Anthropology, Classical Studies, History of Art, and Near Eastern, South Asian and East Asian Studies. With the SCS, I have been a member of the Committee on Professional Ethics, an at-large member of the Board of Directors, and member of the Nominating Committee. I have also served as President of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States, the regional Classics organization in my University’s geographical area. All these experiences have taken me into very different fields and allowed me to participate in a diversity of scholarly communities, as they work to to define the place of ancient studies in the contemporary world. I have valued this intellectual diversity immensely—it has enriched my understanding of the remarkable breadth of our discipline, however one defines it, and its exhilarating range of questions posed and methodologies deployed.
Goals:
Over the past decade the SCS has been a leading force in confronting the critical issues facing our discipline today. Most urgent among these are the need to rethink the scope and purview of Classical studies and its reception, to work for greater equity and inclusiveness within its educational and scholarly structures, and to connect with an eager, non-specialist public. These issues will surely still be of great concern for the foreseeable future, and I would look forward to helping the SCS continue to engage with them.
One issue that justifiably causes great anxiety is an outsized emphasis on STEM fields among academic leaders, parents, students, and the public at large. The result is a cultural value system that often seems to leave little space for humanistic disciplines. Having co-taught courses with scientists and worked both on traditionally humanistic topics and in areas that intersect with natural and social sciences (evolutionary biology, biological anthropology, cognitive psychology, medicine), I have come to believe that the the commonly imagined divide between the humanities and the sciences is considerably exaggerated. Part of our task as humanists is to change the very discourse about disciplines—not to abandon disciplinary parameters, but to focus on the interfluidity of questions and topics of scrutiny across them. There are both obvious and subtle connections even between disciplinary realms felt to have the hardest joins—Classics and the natural sciences, for example, or Classics and Engineering. I would like to see our field explore all of these in a spirit of common intellectual enterprise. Perhaps the hottest topic of the day, the promise—or threat, depending on one’s point of view—of AI will likely be on the front-burner in all scholarly areas within a few years. The SCS will want to get up to speed and ahead of this issue as soon as possible, and this is one of the initiatives I would particularly welcome as President.
Vice President for Professional Matters
Antony Augoustakis
Professor of Classics and Associate Dean for the Humanities and Interdisciplinary Programs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
I am honored to be nominated for the position of Vice President for Professional Matters in the Society and to be able to offer my help and experience in any way that is needed in this critical juncture in US higher education. As an Associate Dean for the Humanities and Interdisciplinary Programs in my home institution I am well versed in and aware of the many challenges we face in academia, culturally, socially, and politically, challenges that demand from us to fight for many of the rights that had been won long ago. Of course, Classics is not immune to societal change and transformation; our field has always been called to answer challenging questions and at times solve (effectively or not) many issues.
Some of the priorities for the next few years should be the following: first, there is work to be done with our commitment to diversity and inclusion; this is not a simple task that can be addressed in a month or a year but takes constant effort from us all every day, now and in the future. We have long been marked as a profession with prejudice, associated with white supremacy and the appropriation of the ancient world for dark purposes. But we have also often been linked to practices that privilege only certain categories and groups, be it because of skin color or accent or sexual orientation. Let us seriously question our past practices, let us make the effort in our institutions to embrace our members in all their diversity and find common ground. Making our workplace diverse is not limited to the hire of one or two co-workers from underrepresented groups, but it rather continues daily, in our instruction, in the service to our communities. Let us see people and stand with them in all honesty and humility! Second, we ought to increase our support of contingent faculty. As academic ranks have extensively expanded non-tenure stream positions, we should be particularly attentive to vulnerabilities involved. How can we effectively address and remedy professional gender and salary inequities by providing resources? Travel and research funds, fellowship opportunities, visibility in the field come to mind as some possibilities. Third, the new Data Committee needs to be supported by the Society, as we need to create ways and avenues for the collection and interpretation of data, a long desideratum for the SCS. Finally and most importantly, fundraising should focus on supporting undergraduate and graduate studies as well as departments in danger, where possible. But it all starts much earlier in education, already in middle and high schools, and we should strengthen our support for such programs.
From the beginning of my career, I have been able to serve the SCS and the profession in a variety of ways: I have served on several SCS committees (Coffin, Minority Scholarship, Development, Nominating); I was the secretary-treasurer for the WCC, President of CAMWS, and editor of two journals, ICS and CJ. I was also honored to receive the SCS award for excellence in teaching. I have taught at private institutions in the beginning of my career and now for the longest period at one of the largest public universities in the country, in Illinois, where I was Head of my Department for five years, before becoming Director of the School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics and then Associate Dean for the Humanities and Interdisciplinary Programs in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. I am working with 22 Departments and Units in the Humanities and Ethnic Studies (e.g., English, History, Classics, Spanish/Portuguese, French and Italian, Linguistics, African American Studies, American Indian Studies, among others); this position has given me the opportunity to work closely with other Departments in the Humanities and work effectively to address some of the same issues and problems from enrollments and ever-shrinking budgets to TA funding and job opportunities for our undergraduate and graduate students. As a proud product and member of the American educational system, I am committed to paying forward all opportunities given to me many years ago; I intend to work hard to accomplish as much as possible and help move our association and field forward.
Link to CV and link to website
Stephanie McCarter
Professor, Department of Classics, Sewanee: The University of the South
I am honored to stand for the SCS’s Vice-President for Professional Matters. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the field of classics, and, if elected, I will advocate for the particular needs of colleagues in a wide variety of institutional settings. My own background has given me broad institutional experience. I have taught for sixteen years in a small department at The University of the South (aka Sewanee), a private liberal arts college in rural Tennessee, prior to which I was a contingent faculty member at a similar institution. My own undergraduate education was at a large public university, which I attended as a first-generation college student from Appalachia.
These experiences have honed my conviction that the field must simply become more adaptable not only to remedy the gender, racial, and economic disparities that have long plagued it but also to wage an effective defense when programs and positions are under threat. I will foster a flexible conception of teaching, research, and service that attends to the needs of contingent and tenured/tenure-track faculty alike, one that focuses on small and interdisciplinary programs as much as traditional classics departments at large universities. I will advocate for tenure and promotion standards which advance the kinds of outreach and publication that demonstrate our value to the larger world, such as digital humanities, performance, and translation. Such adaptability should extend to the types of vocations we prepare our students, at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, to enter. Building on the work that many among us are already doing, I would like to enable conversations that help classics students, and especially those seeking alternate paths after graduate school, articulate the transferable skills they have gained, as well as conversations that let faculty from a range of institutions share creative, yet practical ideas for strengthening and diversifying the field. Such a “big tent” approach to classics is necessary for the field to break free from a traditional model that only works well for a small, privileged sliver of it.
I have served the field and my institution extensively. I am, for instance, currently the CAMWS Vice President for the Upper South and have served on its Executive and Membership Committees. I have been the SCS Tribune for Tennessee and presently serve on the SCS Committee on Translations of Classical Authors, which I will begin chairing next year as we advocate for the SCS to inaugurate an award in literary translation. I am the Elections Officer for the International Ovidian Society, a position that gives me a seat on its Steering Committee, and serve on the editorial board of its new journal Ovidius. I have additionally served on a number of committees at my institution, such as the Curriculum and Academic Policy Committee, the Leaves Committee, and the Appointments Committee. In 2019, my institutional service was recognized with Sewanee’s Faculty Award for Excellence in Service to the Institution. I was, moreover, selected to give the Inaugural Faculty Address at Sewanee’s winter convocation this past January, which allowed me to champion the study of antiquity for its capacity to open our eyes to new perspectives, to offer us creative delight, and to sharpen our intellectual curiosity.
Vice President for Program
Joel Christensen
Professor of Classical and Early Mediterranean Studies, Senior Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, Brandeis University
The Program Committee of the Society for Classical Studies has long been one of the more consequential bodies of our professional society. I well remember the days of waiting for mailed rejections or acceptances of abstract submissions in late June or July and hearing how the meeting planning process worked from my advisor, David Sider. As the SCS’s Task Force on Annual Meeting Final Report clarifies, however, the conventional role of the Annual Meeting (and the SCS’ programs in general) has changed as our field has undergone shifts in mission, casualization of labor, a shifting of first-round interviews from the conference to remote options, and as concerns for the financial and environmental sustainability of these practices have grown.
We have asked (and been asked) to consider not just how we will conduct our meetings in the future but as well what the essential function of these meetings are to be. Given how unpredictable that future is–and how rapidly changing our own expectations of our discipline and professional societies are–the SCS Task Force made a wise and necessary recommendation to define the next five years as an initial period of experimentation in figuring out how our annual programs can best serve our membership, the future of our disciplines, and our guiding principles. We need a program that is accessible to people of all backgrounds and abilities; we need meetings that allow us to get to know each other and build the foundation to advocate for our fields; and we need opportunities to learn from each other in dynamic and creative ways that include conventional scholarly outputs alongside enriching workshops, exciting performances, and formats I am too institutionalized to imagine.
I don’t have a ready answer to how often we should meet, the extent to which we should abandon an in-person national gathering, or how best to serve the diverse interests of scholarship, professional development, and advocacy that are central to our organization. Instead, I do have a long record of inveterate tinkering with public scholarship through social media, blogs, public-facing writing, online performances, and remote conferences (from my own website sententiaeantiquae.com to the COVID-era project Reading Greek Tragedy Online). In addition to this array of online and remote work, I also have built a record of leadership at my own institution, where I have served as Departmental Chair, Chair of the Faculty Senate, Senior Associate Dean for the Faculty Affairs, and, now, Senior Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs. These administrative roles, especially, have almost all taken place during periods of change or crisis, from the election of 2016, through the COVID-19 Pandemic, into the financial and geopolitical strife of the last year. I am comfortable with uncomfortable conversations; I am accustomed to carrying out tasks and processes well, even when I have not designed them and may not fully agree with them.
While I do not have clear plans or answers to how to change the SCS Annual Meeting, I believe that my agnosticism, combined with my years of working in partnership with people from different institutions and mindsets through crisis, will position me well to help the SCS board experiment with new meeting models and listen to core constituencies in charting future courses, while also helping to manage the uncertainties of event planning in an increasingly volatile public sphere. I am deeply invested in helping us develop models that are inclusive and sustainable to support all members of our discipline for years to come.
Sara Lindheim
Professor of Classics, University of California, Santa Barbara
I am honored that the Nominating Committee asked me to stand for election for the position of Vice President for Program.
For the last few years, the SCS membership has been engaged in conversations about what we want the annual meeting to look like as we move forward. The pandemic and the pivot towards Zoom have meant that one critical function of the meeting, as the place where job candidates interview for positions, no longer holds. This new reality opens up a productive space of possibility to reimagine the annual meeting from the ground up, and the Board has committed to exploring new formats beginning in 2027 and 2028. I enthusiastically support this project and hope that every facet, starting with the dates of the event, can be up for discussion once we move past the next 2 meetings for which arrangements have already been made. My goal is to work towards a formula for the annual meeting that draws the largest possible participation of scholars at all stages of their careers, inclusive of independent scholars. To me this means considering a variety of changes. The January meeting date has recently caused large-scale problems, both because of winter weather events and the peak of Covid/flu/cold seasons. With the job market no longer a concern, we should now weigh the possibilities of moving the meeting to a time when flights and health are not so jeopardized, maintaining, as a desideratum, the ability to hold the event jointly with the AIA. In addition, we need to be mindful of members who cannot join the meetings in person, for any number of valid reasons. We must work to create a hybrid program that is accessible to all who want to participate (and this means finding venues with adequate tech set-up and support, while, of course, working within budgetary constraints). We should also take the opportunity to reimagine the program of events themselves so that they reflect the changing ideas within our field, with the goal of constructing a program that highlights diverse topics and diverse participants. We need to examine the types of sessions that we provide, seeking to make space for emerging scholars with new ideas and new visions to share their research with one another, as well as room for more junior and more senior scholars to come into contact with one another for intellectual exchange and mentorship opportunities. Do the current sessions that primarily involve paper-reading allow space for the greatest number of different voices? Or do we need to be creative in conceiving of new formats designed to increase the sharing of perspectives and approaches? Finally, in order to attract and assist participants in early stages of their careers to propose sessions or to offer papers, the Program Committee should host online sessions about a month before proposals/abstract are due with the goal of sharing best-practices for successful abstract/session-proposal writing.
My primary interest in standing for this position is to have the opportunity to participate in reimagining the program at the annual meeting so that it showcases the greatest number of different voices and approaches in Classics today across scholars at all stages of their careers. My service to the profession and to my university provides me with experience in fostering diversity and inclusion, lifting up voices of early career scholars, as well as in large-scale organization and leadership, to reach these goals. My service as a member of the SCS (at the time APA) committee then called the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, and my current role at UCSB as Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Advocate for graduate students in Classics underscore my efforts at making our field more diverse and inclusive. My term as SCS Legate for Southern California was motivated by my inclusionary aspirations. In the recently published Routledge Handbook of Classics and Queer Theory my co-editors and I made it a guiding principle to hear from more than just “the usual suspects,” actively seeking out contributions from a large number of early-career scholars (17 out of the 32 chapters). I have also recently joined the editorial board of a new series from De Gruyter, QT Antiquities, that seeks to promote the new and exciting work of early career scholars in queer theory and Classics, as well as the editorial board of the journal, Helios, known for its open interdisciplinary and theoretical aspirations. At UCSB I have broad experience in university service, gaining insight through committees into a variety of issues including budget, enrollment, and faculty governance. I have been Chair and Graduate Advisor of Classics, Vice-Chair of the Comparative Literature Program as well as long-term member of the program’s board. In addition, I have co-organized and presided over an international conference and an SCS (then APA) panel, and was a member of the planning committee and co-chair of the program committee for the “Feminism and Classics III” conference held at USC.
Vice President for Publications and Research
T. H. M. Gellar-Goad
Professor of Classics and Denton Fellow, Wake Forest University
Experience and qualifications:
I recently completed a term as Chair of the SCS Communications Committee and Editor-in-Chief of the SCS Blog, so I have the background and knowledge needed to run the Committee on Publications and Research, oversee the Committee on Translation of Classical Authors, and coordinate with the current Editor-in-Chief and the VP for Outreach and Communications on SCS Blog matters. At Wake Forest University, I have run a tenure-line search, and in that process, I overhauled my department’s procedures to match best practices and maximize equity; I will bring that skill set with me to the next TAPA editorship search. I have served on several nonprofit and party boards over the past two decades, and my expertise in facilitating meetings and streamlining procedure has most recently been recognized in my election by the Wake Forest faculty to serve as Parliamentarian for the College — all of which offers value to proceedings of the Board of Directors.
Aims if elected:
TAPA, long a flagship journal of our field, has been reaching ever greater heights in recent years, in both content and process, and supporting the editorial team in building strength upon strength will be my top priority. As part of those support efforts, and with the recent end of Latomus, I will seek to foster lines of communication about the current state of the field and the current health of academic journals, both among editors across the discipline and between editors and SCS member-scholars. I also believe that a major growth area for our discipline is public scholarship, so I will develop (in consultation with the Division on Outreach and Communications) a series of virtual panels and workshops for SCS members centered on writing for public audiences, developing a profile as a public scholar, and engaging with audiences outside the profession.
Sean Gurd
Professor and Chair, Department of Classics, University of Texas at Austin
Classical scholarship has never been as exciting as it is now. We are pushing envelopes and taking risks as never before. The art of translation has seen a remarkable renaissance both in its practice and theorization; the study of classical reception and comparative antiquities has transformed classical studies from an area-discipline focussed on ancient Greece and Rome into a scholarly practice with broad horizons; we see engagements with arts practice that have brought poetry, drama, and music into dialogue with scholarship to produce entirely new ways of knowing. Of course, these are only the subjects I am personally engaged with (or by); inevitably, I am leaving much of value and interest out. But the fact remains: these days there are reasons to feel nothing but enthusiasm about the work happening in this field.
That said, we must acknowledge the challenges the field faces. Many publishers’ lists have shrunk; some publishers have moved away from classical scholarship entirely; production values and processes have changed dramatically, even for the most prestigious publishers; prices for physical books continue to rise, while electronic formats have become much more widespread, primarily through library-based subscription services.
The landscape on which classical research takes place has also changed, as libraries face a relentless grind of budget cuts and increasing demands on space. As a result, classical scholars increasingly work in contexts without daily access to high-quality, up-to-date, open-stack book collections, and even with limited digital subscriptions. In such contexts, research grows slower and more expensive, as scholars must find the funds to travel to gain access to collections in order to finish work, wait for interlibrary loan services, or pay personally for digital access to electronic resources. These conditions, which are now widespread and recognizable by a decent proportion of our membership, cannot but have profound consequences both for the pace of research production and the shape of careers.
I believe that the SCS has a crucial role to play in providing support for scholars, both in terms of the conditions in which they work and the outlets where they publish; indeed, developing a strong infrastructure that helps as many scholars in as many places as possible is among the most important things the organization can do to reach its goal of a truly open field. Our current channels are excellent, and it is clear that those who serve as journal or book series editors, or indeed those who edit volumes or write as peer reviewers for presses and journals, are doing a stellar job of opening classics to a wider array of methods and voices, mentoring new scholars. They are contributing to a genuinely exciting moment in classical scholarship, and we must continue to support and celebrate them. At the same time, we must continue to think about ways to develop infrastructures that will support as many scholars as possible.
There may be new opportunities. One example: open-access and scholar-led digital publishing can provide research results to anyone with an internet connection, and the comparatively low cost of this kind of publishing means that scholarly publication need not be centralized at a small number of increasingly overburdened channels. Peer-review, the gold standard for short-form and long-form scholarship, can now be overseen by small, independent editorial groups; and it can even happen both before and after publication. The result might be a field in which some scholars publish traditional monographs, commentaries, and texts with university presses, while others publish databases or multi-media data-delivery systems with open-access publishing groups dedicated to such projects, and yet others benefit from peer-review credentialization for arts practice (musical compositions and reconstructions, new dramaturgical methods).
The idea of scholar-led open-access publishing has been around for almost 20 years. The barriers to its recognition have not been technological or even financial, but cultural and administrative, and to make progress developing it we would need to have a wide-ranging conversation about how we value scholarly production. Departments might choose to make explicit statements supporting alternative modes of publication for the purposes of tenure and promotion; the very real burdens of editorial service would have to be acknowledged in workload policies and promotion guidelines; new open-access publishers or editorial groups would need to ensure that they were publishing work which was of the highest quality; reviewers of promotion dossiers would need to be able to say that new publication channels were field-standard; and we would have to educate deans, provosts, and presidents about changing expectations in classics. The SCS could facilitate such a cultural shift by sparking the conversation and providing both training and resources to support it. Of course, this could not be done overnight, but I believe it might be worth a try.
The agenda I have just laid out is very much my agenda; it is one I would happily carry forward, but I think it is more important to emphasize that it is one example of the kind of thing I would like to explore: research and publication infrastructure that furthers the SCS’s desire to keep moving in the direction of greater openness.
I believe I am well-placed to explore our opportunities in this regard. My experience as a member of the editorial board of Tangent, an imprint of the scholar-led, open-access publisher punctum, has given me first-hand experience of the challenges and rewards of working in such a publishing environment. I have been employed in classics departments or programs (and once, in a philosophy department) in three countries and two continents; I have worked both inside the AAU/R1 world and outside it. I have carried both heavy teaching loads and very light ones. I have experience researching in both resource-rich and resource-poor environments. Over the last few years I have served as department chair, both at the University of Missouri (for one year) and at the University of Texas at Austin (since 2022); in this latter position, part of my job has been to advocate for research resources in classics to both the college and the library. These dialogues have given me insight into the pressures libraries are under, as well as the kinds of approaches that can work both for scholars and for the larger institutions that control the materials we depend on for our work. I believe in process, creativity, and multi-agency. I prefer to act as a facilitator and a mediator for others. I am grateful to have had multiple opportunities to learn to listen and search for solutions to difficult problems, and I know that whatever ability I have to do these things (I’m still working on it!) comes in no small part from my lifelong engagement with ancient texts and ideas.
Junior Financial Trustee
Mathias Hanses
Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies, African Studies, and African American Studies, Penn State University
I am honored to have been nominated to serve as Junior Financial Trustee of the SCS, an important position in this time of budgetary upheavals across higher education in the US. The JFT serves a six-year term on the SCS Board of Directors as well as on the Finance Committee. The latter’s tasks include “drawing up an annual budget of the Society, supervising its operation, and controlling the investment of the funds of the Society.” I have extensive administrative and leadership experience pertaining to this position. Most relevant is my service as President of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States in 2023, which was part of a longer cursus honorum (2020-2024) that included four years of service on CAAS’s Finance Committee (one year as chair). I am currently CAAS’s Officer-at-Large. I also served on the CAMWS Finance Committee from 2015 to 2019 (two years as chair). As a result of this time spent in the leadership of different Classics organizations, I am familiar with the drafting of budgets and the considerations that inform the management of investment portfolios.
Among my further service experiences, I will mention here only those that speak both to my familiarity with longer-term (budgetary) planning and to my dedication to the centering of marginalized voices and the fostering of inclusive communities in the field of Classics. To start with, I am a co-president of “Eos: Africana Receptions of Ancient Greece and Rome” (eosafricana.org), an affiliate group with the SCS that I co-founded in 2017. At Penn State, I have also been a member of the university-wide Joint Curricular Task Force on Racial and Social Justice and the Global Academic Leadership Council (GALC). As a Faculty Senator, I have been Chair of the Global Programs Committee and Vice Chair for the Committee on Educational Equity and Campus Environment (EECE). I was also an appointed member of the Presidential Commission on Racial/Ethnic Diversity (CORED), and for three years, I co-chaired the Committee on Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformation (CoDIT) in the College of the Liberal Arts. On the SCS Board of Directors, I would put this experience to use in support of initiatives that expand access to and affordability of SCS offerings, and address the increasing precarity among students and faculty in this time of cuts in higher education in general, and in the humanities in particular.
For my teaching and publication record in the areas of Roman drama, Latin literature, reception studies, and race, status, and difference in the ancient Mediterranean, please see my CV:
Jonathan Ready
Professor of Classical Studies, University of Michigan
The SCS’s junior financial trustee serves for three years and then automatically becomes the senior financial trustee and holds that position for another three years. I am eager to make that commitment for two reasons. First, I look forward to paying back all the SCS has done for me over the years (starting in the days when one hoped to see one’s candidate number on the board) by helping it navigate its current challenges, from what to do with the annual meeting to how to address the ever-decreasing number of tenure track jobs. Given my particular set of skills, I can best contribute to the organization as a financial trustee. Second, an organization expresses its values in how it uses money. As a financial trustee, I hope to help the SCS handle its finances in ways that articulate and live up to its values.
The financial trustees serve on the Board of Directors and on the Finance Committee. I have worked intensively with small groups of colleagues for most of my career. For six summers, I taught beginning Greek with three other teachers at the City University of New York’s Latin Greek/Institute. Two colleagues and I turned the Program in Classics into the Department of Classics at the University of Miami. For eight years, I directed the Program in Ancient Studies at Indiana University in consultation with a rotating cast of two other board members. The SCS Board of Directors and Finance Committee are likewise small groups, and I know what is required to work in a collegial and productive fashion in such an environment. As far as managing the money goes, I can point to having managed the finances of the Program in Ancient Studies at Indiana.
Directors-at-large
Sulochana Asirvatham
Professor, Department of Classics and General Humanities, Montclair State University
I’d like to thank the nominating committee for inviting me to run for the office of Director-at-Large. I’m Professor in the Department of Classics and General Humanities at Montclair State University in suburban NJ, where I’ve taught since 2002. I’ve not previously held office in SCS, but I’ve been in the field a long time and have long experience in both public and private institutions. As such I’ve gained considerable insight into how Classics sits in both these worlds. Part of my goal as a board member would be to bring schools like mine into the conversation about the future of Classics.
MSU’s mission is to serve the general population of NJ and has around 20,000 students. It is as diverse a crowd demographically as one could imagine. Of those Americans who go to college or graduate school, the vast majority go to a school that is more like MSU than an Ivy, yet the MSUs of the world appear to have almost no role in public discourse about education in any field, including Classics, existing in a sort of parallel universe—analogous to “flyover country”—to bigger name institutions. Some questions to consider are: Do we believe Classics should only exist to produce new Classicists? Or that Classicists can only come from elite schools? Beyond that: do we value Classics enough to want as many others as possible to value it as well?
My department has twelve full-time faculty and employs a number of contingent faculty to teach about 5000 students per year, with our highest enrollments in Mythology, Troy and the Trojan War, Greek Civilization, and Roman Civilization. We also have robust crowds in both Greek and Latin, some of whom become Classics majors and move on to MA and PhD Programs in Classics and related fields. We’re a popular department because we enjoy what we do, and the material we study is so rich and varied that we find it easy to teach in the spirit of inclusivity.
In the past, MSU has prided itself as a place where students can earn degrees in the same areas of study offered by more expensive schools. More recently, in their enthusiasm to cut programs, management has begun to talk about "our students" as a monolith who are only fit to major/minor in "career-oriented" fields—a frankly racist and classist position they can get away with as long as no one is watching. We are all at the mercy of institutional and societal shortsightedness, but Classics and other traditional humanities departments are unlikely to disappear from elite institutions. They are, on the other hand, quite at risk at institutions like mine. By the time news of a department shut-down hits and the petitions start circulating, it is usually too late. The logical end of this trend is that Classics will someday only be encountered by students at elite colleges and universities. In my role as board member, I would hope to work at addressing some of the issues involved in maintaining, and expanding, access to the study of Classics.
Alexander Beecroft
Jessie Chapman Alcorn Memorial Professor of Foreign Languages, Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina
Classical Studies is at a crossroads, as it considers how to expand its self-understanding and its self-awareness, while continuing to promote and transmit the discipline’s highly specialized textual and material skills. All of this, of course, is taking place in the context of continual threats to institutional funding and the challenges of transforming student engagement into the majors and graduate students we need to survive institutionally. We must fight harder for resources every year, while intellectually the list of things we want to understand continues to grow. I have spent the past twenty-five years approaching these questions from my distinct perspective – scholarship on Ancient Greece and China. My scholarship has argued for (and I hope enacted) the methodological closeness between (Mediterranean) Classical Studies and Early China Studies, as fields in which interdisciplinarity is not merely a buzzword, but an indispensable dimension of our work. My work has also brought me into discussions of World Literature, and of how to ensure that global pre-modern texts, including those in Greek and Latin, find an important place in those discussions. Throughout, I have maintained the importance of conversation across the disciplines, regions, and temporalities, insisting that each field of study is rich in theoretical insights which should do more to inform other fields of study. All of that experience informs my commitment to helping Classical Studies become a field more open and inclusive, both in the new students we attract and in our objects of study.
I have taught for the past fourteen years at a large public university in the South, where we face a challenge familiar in Classical Studies: huge student interest in the ancient world at the introductory levels, combined with much greater difficulties in recruiting the undergraduate majors needed to ensure the ongoing viability and growth of the field. Scarce time, staffing, and money cannot be directed fully at both, and while it’s important that we nurture that latent undergraduate fascination with the ancient world which is key to our survival, we need to find better strategies than we have of convincing students to become classics majors. The SCS has a crucial role to play in developing and promoting such strategies.
I also have eight years of experience of learned-society administration, having served as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Comparative Literature Association from 2011-2019, during which time the organization was fortunate to grow rapidly, and had to acquire the staffing, financial resources, bylaws, and administrative capacity to cope with that growth. I discovered that involvement in a learned society is always a balance between moving forward with exciting new projects and the demanding task of maintaining existing programs, thinking about the big picture without letting the day-to-day work suffer. The situation of the SCS is distinctive in many ways, but many of the obstacles and opportunities are similar, and my experience leaves me ready to contribute effectively to our Society.
Aileen Das
Associate Professor, Department of Classical Studies, University of Michigan
I am honored to be nominated for a position on the board of directors of the Society for Classical Studies. If elected, I would bring my commitment to envisioning a more globally oriented society in terms of its research agendas and support of diverse scholarly communities – both inside and outside the academy.
The director position represents a reparative opportunity for me. As an individual from minoritized backgrounds (race, class, and gender), I feel motivated to enact changes to make classics a more welcoming place than I initially found it. Personal experiences, such as having my accent and grammar policed in an undergraduate classroom to being told that my research interests were ‘un-classical’ as a MA student, drive me to think of ways to flatten the vertical, prescriptive structures at the heart of classical studies. I would be keen to find ways to center marginalized voices in the society at large, through, for example, mainstreaming ‘DEI’ initiatives. I am troubled by the siloing of ‘DEI’ work into committees that often have no real power to integrate their recommendations into the structures they seek to broaden. A radical step would be to distribute this service work onto all the SCS’s committees, whether through the appointment of ‘DEI’ point persons to these committees or revisioning their missions.
I would be keen to contribute to these kinds of discussions, as well as those about how to better incorporate K-12 educators and those with interests in classics outside the university environment. While university educators rely on the recruitment initiatives of teachers ‘downstream’, the society could do more to support their pedagogical and personal research efforts. For instance, many K-12 teachers do not have access to the same library resources (physical and digital) that those at the university level have at their disposal. I would like to explore a way to subsidize or library share (in concert with member universities) access to key classical journals, monographs etc. to ensure that these vital members of our community are equipped with a full range of professional tools.
My own service career has crossed several disciplinary lines, including stints as director of Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Ancient History and graduate certificate in Science, Technology, and Society Studies, as well as membership on the college’s executive committee for the Institute of the Humanities. My experience in dialoguing across disciplines has been furthered by a tenure on the university’s Senate Faculty Assembly, in which I worked to expand membership to include non-tenure track faculty in the libraries and clinics on the medical campus. I am currently the president of the Society for Ancient Medicine, an international forum which has enabled me and like-minded colleagues to expand the traditional classical core of ancient science to encompass the many pre-modern classical cultures and their interpretations of natural knowledge.
Deborah Kamen
Professor and Chair, Department of Classics, University of Washington
I would be honored to serve on the SCS’ Board of Directors. The past four years I have been Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Washington, a medium-sized PhD-granting program; before that, I served for five years as Graduate Program Coordinator and Chair of my Department’s DEI Committee. I also served for nine years as Co-Chair of the Lambda Classical Caucus (the coalition of LGBTQ+ Classicists and their allies affiliated with the SCS) and have served on and chaired the SCS’ Pearson Fellowship Committee. In addition, I have served as a member of the SCS’ Intersectional Mentoring Program Committee (now defunct, but happily reborn as a network of smaller mentorship programs run by individual affiliated groups) and recently received the Randall Howarth Prize for Excellence in Mentoring from the Association of Ancient Historians. Finally, my experience co-organizing Feminism and Classics VII (2016) and the Classical Association of the Pacific Northwest Annual Meeting (2023) have prepared me to fulfill the SCS Board’s role in rethinking the format and modalities of the SCS’ annual meeting.
If elected, I would bring to the Board my perspective as an openly queer scholar at a large and diverse public university. I would act in the interests of all members of the SCS, with a particular commitment to advocating for those with marginalized identities and those whose status is most precarious. Supporting and facilitating mentorship in various forms is one important way of achieving these goals. I would also want to build on the SCS’ recent successes in bolstering the inclusiveness of our field, focusing especially on increasing the accessibility of our annual meeting. In this vein, I am committed to putting into practice the recommendations of the 2023 Presidential Task Force on the Future of the SCS Annual Meeting, which articulates a vision foregrounding social, economic, and environmental justice.
Andrea Kouklanakis
Associate Professor, Department of Classical and Oriental Studies, Hunter College, CUNY
The issues dearest to my heart are those that converge the personal, the political, and institutional, which apply to a well-functioning scholarly society whose aim is to promote classical studies in all its aspects and with inclusive practices in mind. These are questions of accessibility, racial, gender, geographical, and linguistic equity in classical studies, which need support from stated framework about transparency, accountability, data gathering, and fairness. The geographical and linguistic part of my lobbying interest has to do with a more affirmative engagement with Latin American classicists, who have been doing robust research in areas of interest to the society, especially Latin American scholars of color, who may be at a bigger disadvantage to present their work. I have delivered a paper at the annual conference of BRASA (the Brazilian Studies Association), and there are scholars engaging with research that includes antiquities, classicism and race.
I am a first-generation college graduate, and I am aware of the specific concerns of other first gen classicists whose access to higher education is often compromised by institutional roadblocks along the way (cost and exclusionary practices). The SCS first generation affiliated group recognizes the difficulties involved in the forging of one’s academic identity and careers from scratch, which affect not only first-generation students and faculty but also immigrants. As an immigrant from Brazil and a woman of color, I have deeply pondered the impact of clear institutional support for inclusion, along with mechanisms for accountability. I embody the possibilities, but accessibility ramps require collective action. They need to be codified.
My own educational path is another part of my history that informs my interest to serve as director- at-large. I received my BA from a large public urban college with a highly diverse population, which did, and continues to produce responsible citizens, and to generate opportunities. One such transformative opportunity came to me when I became a fellow in the Mellon Minority (Mays) Undergraduate Fellowship program. The recognition of my efforts, curiosity, and academic excellence, combined with active mentorship, was incredibly life altering. Being seen by both the college and the Mellon foundation was a genuinely important and generative experience. Moving from my urban college into a PhD program at an Ivy League university posed significant challenges, and though I wanted not just to survive, but to thrive in my studies, this was often difficult in the absence of any robust and transparent systems of support at that time. The lesson for me was not a self-congratulatory note about my resilience, but the understanding that it was unfair for any institution to expect such sustained levels of emotional strength. However, I learned to navigate these waters and gained a firm grasp of the ways of different institutions, their mission, structures, demographics, culture.
I am currently an Associate Professor in Classics at Hunter College, with many years of experience teaching at the secondary school level. I understand what it means to develop curricula and teach classics in different ways, at different levels, and for different aims, and even with different meanings of what ‘the classics’ encompasses. I know different institutions have their own challenges and expectations, and my interest in serving the SCS is to help its aims to continue to broaden its impact, by broadening its umbrella to include the vibrant presence and research of academics beyond North America, and Europe, with a particular focus in Latin America. My research interests include antiquities in Black Latin American authors, translation, Homeric poetry, comparative epic, to name the most prominent.
It is undeniable that SCS has been clear about its commitment and desire to meet the moment in which we live, from pandemic, to racism, cultural division, the persistent problem of low representation of people of color, in departments, and scholarly journals, (see the current TAPA article by Arum Park). In addition, there are other challenges, such as roadblocks to accessibility, both physical and financial, the field of digital humanities, Artificial Intelligence, even the modality of annual meetings, and of course membership and funding, to name the most obvious ones. Therefore, as far as the “advancing knowledge” part of the society’s aim, some of the most exciting scholarship and outreach have been to a large extent in response to these various challenges, from queer studies, and disability studies, to developing scholarship in critical studies on the intersection of race and classics aimed at interrogating all aspects of the discipline.
Finally, upholding the “appreciation of the ancient Greek and Roman world and its enduring value” has gained a welcome complexity from previous times and previous understandings of what “enduring” and/or “value” mean. For me, the enduring value of the ancient Greek and Roman world is not only a matter of theoretical contemplation of Greco-Roman cultures and literature, but also the forging of skills, expertise, experience, and communities which need to have administrative, financial, and visionary support. The classics has given me tools to think critically about many things, including its own disciplinary history. It has also pushed me to establish connections and further the work of others who, like me, have had to negotiate many identities. Anyone able and willing can contribute to the discipline by pushing it to become more ethical, more welcoming, and more efficient. I would be happy to play a part in the shaping of SCS’s present and future direction if elected director-a-large.
Graduate Student Director
Jonathan Clark
PhD Candidate, Department of Classics, University of Washington
I’m honored to be among the candidates for the position of Graduate Student Director this election cycle. I’m a PhD student in Classics at the University of Washington (UW) with interests in Latin poetry (particularly pastoral), gender and sexuality, and historical linguistics. I earned an MA in Classical Studies from Tulane University, and a BA in Classics and Linguistics, magna cum laude from the University of Maryland, College Park. Over the past few years, I’ve had the opportunity to attend several SCS meetings both in person and virtually, and have found the annual meeting to be a highly stimulating environment.
If elected, I would be excited to represent graduate student interests on the Board of Directors. After the UW graduate student union and the University recently reached agreement on a new contract, I’m feeling particularly energized. Participation in union events has given me a keener sense of the needs of graduate students across an R1 institution in Classics and other disciplines. I would also bring the perspective of a first-generation graduate student to the board. I'm especially keen on working towards a more accessible SCS coming from a department with a strong commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, whose values I share.
Emma Pauly
PhD Student, Department of Classics, UCLA
I am honored to be nominated once again for Graduate Student Director of the SCS; the Nominating Committee has my heartfelt thanks. By the time of this election, I will be a 3rd year graduate student in UCLA’s Department of Classics researching the queer and divine body in tragedy and archaic poetry, having completed an MA in Classics through the University of Chicago MAPH Program. Prior to that, I have received my BA from the University of Chicago and an MA from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Before entering the field of Classics, I have worked as a performer, dramaturg, and translator, specializing in works engaged with Ancient Mediterranean antiquity.
If elected to the position of Graduate Student Director, one of my top priorities will be be keeping in step with the Graduate Student Committee and ensuring that their wishes and thoughts are communicated to the Board. I will also bring my perspective to bear on issues within the field that impact the lives of graduate students, both in their capacities as scholars and as community members: greater attention to material culture, reception, and antiquity beyond the Greco-Roman, tangible steps towards combating discrimination and inequity, and providing easier access to information about alt-academic paths.
In addition to the issues and struggles unique to the discipline of Classics, I also hope to advocate for the SCS’ eye on issues that do not originate from within the field. This year (though hardly for the first time), graduate students across the country, including a great number of Classics students and those otherwise involved with Ancient Mediterranean studies, have protested ongoing global injustice (commensurate with a long tradition of student protests such as those against the Vietnam War and in favor of the American civil rights movement) only to be met with neglect, hostility, or outright violence from their administrators and those who are supposed to protect and nurture their student bodies. While I completely understand that it is beyond the power of the SCS to allay this on a national level, I believe it to be the moral obligation of any organization connected to education to speak out on behalf of its students. Such actions are not out of the reach of classically affiliated organizations, as demonstrated by the WCC UK’s recent statement.
I would also hope to extend this recognition and protection to graduate student unions that encompass Classics students, who have also been pursuing fair compensation and tenable working conditions for graduate student workers in recent years. I will advocate, as a member of the board, for students continuing to organize and encourage others to make their positions public on such matters.
Lastly, as a student with a non-traditional path through the field (having worked in an entirely different industry for years prior), I will also advocate for interdisciplinarity—not only within different academic fields, but outside of the academy. It is my hope to create dialogue between the SCS and artists, not as a means of mining material to write on or celebrating Classical reception alone, but to allow creatives the space and resources they need to investigate the ancient world on their own terms.
Helen Wong
PhD Candidate, Art and Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, University of Pennsylvania
I am honored to be considered for the position of Graduate Student Director. Since entering grad school, I have found great comfort and support in the community of this field, especially among its grad students. I cannot overstate how important the community of my peers has been. Some of you reading this may know me from an Eidolon article I wrote in 2018 as a senior in undergrad, contemplating whether I wanted to commit to being in the field. I had many qualms about Classics, its political and racial baggage, and whether I, a first-generation Asian-American, would be able to find a place in it. In the end, I earned my B.A. in History and Classical Studies at Brandeis University, followed by an MSt in Classical Archaeology at Oxford. I am now four years into my PhD program at the University of Pennsylvania. I still have many of the qualms that I started my journey with, but having been able to rely on my fellow grad students for support every step of the way has been a crucial factor in my decision to continue it. I have come to understand that building community is not necessarily about large, sweeping actions, but rather, about repeated, consistent commitment to little actions, creating mutual support and solidarity wherever possible.
In the last few years, I have engaged in service work that furthers that commitment. As the former Director of the Asian and Asian American Classical Caucus (AAACC)’s mentorship program, I ran two cycles of the program, pairing over fifty people in each round. I organized meet-ups, checked in with mentorship pairings, participated in the program myself, and collaborated with other organizations, including the Women’s Classical Caucus, the Christian Cole Society at Oxford, London Classicists of Color, and the Mountaintop Coalition. The AAACC’s mentorship program is now in its sixth year and remains one of the most successful programs of its kind in the field. At AIA-SCS 2023, I presented on an SCS panel dedicated to examining professional mentorship and organized the AAACC panel that year, “Dreaming of the Silk Road: Narrative Conversations,” as well. At Penn, my home institution, I have been involved in DEI and student advocacy efforts such as organizing graduate student conferences and supporting the student union.
If I were to take on the role of Graduate Student Director, I would use my experience and connections to advocate for the interests of the graduate student community. I would bring my personal commitment to peer solidarity and mutual support to the position, making every effort possible to ensure that grad student voices are heard and acted upon. I am excited at the prospect of being a part of the SCS’ continual evolution and improvement.
Contingent Faculty Director
Joshua Nudell
Visiting Assistant Professor, Truman State University
I am honored to have been nominated for the position of Contingent Faculty Director. Contingency is an existential threat facing the field of Classics. It is a crisis that underpins every aspect of the field from how we run graduate programs to the sustainability of undergraduate degrees to the employment conditions and professional opportunities of a growing cohort of scholars and teachers. It is also a multifaceted problem, as I have experienced first-hand in my career. I have exclusively worked in contingent positions since earning my PhD in 2017, with jobs that include a half-time visiting position, per-course adjunct work, temporary unemployment and doing contract editorial work, and now a full-time and renewable, but non-tenure track, position. Over this same period, I have, like many other contingent faculty, continued to research and engage in professional service despite heavy teaching loads and professional instability.
From 2021 to 2024, I served on the SCS Committee on Contingent Faculty. Among other activities during this time, I co-organized a round table at the 2022 SCS Annual Meeting, twice served on the panel that assessed the contingent faculty grant program, and helped organize a series blog posts for the SCS Blog on contingent faculty issues. My aim on the committee was two-fold: to support individual contingent faculty members by providing platforms and resources that can further their careers, and to move the discourse around contingent employment to build support for improving the material working conditions of people in these positions. If elected, I will continue the work I started on this committee. These are problems without easy solutions. Austerity regimes still rule in the humanities and entire programs are under threat of closure, but these realities make it more important than ever to create opportunities and support for contingent faculty to ensure a sustainable future for the field.
James Patterson
Senior Lector I and Language Program Director, Classics, Yale University
It is an honor to have been nominated to run for Director of Contingent Faculty. It shouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that we, contingent faculty, are the lifeblood of many departments across the country. There are departments that would not have survived the pandemic without us, and there are departments that could not now function without us, pandemic aside. Sometimes we take a contingent position while navigating an unresponsive job market (this was me). Sometimes we choose a contingent position because it turns out to be not bad (this is me). But why we are in this position is beside the point. It is about time that our work is compensated properly in pay, employee benefits, and funds for research. At a minimum.
I have a BA in Classical Civilization from UMass Amherst (2003), an MAT in Latin and Classical Humanities also from UMass Amherst (2006), and a PhD in Classics from UT Austin (2015). I spent 2015 to 2021 at UT Austin as a Lecturer in Classics and the Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts & Ideas (a four year “great books” certificate program). In that time I taught a whole range of Greek and Latin language courses, literature and history courses, large lecture courses and small seminars, courses of my own design on topics very much in my wheelhouse, and courses on things very much outside of it (Shakespeare and modern drama, for instance). I devoted all of my free time to the job market. Meanwhile, I experienced most things that contingent faculty deal with, directly or indirectly. It is in part because of this that I agreed to run for this position.
In 2021 I was hired to create the position of Language Program Director in Classics at Yale at the rank of Senior Lector I (a distinctly Yale title, I think, that designates a teacher of languages with a three-year renewable contract). In this position I am responsible for setting the curriculum of intro and intermediate Greek and Latin, supervising graduate students who teach these courses, and helping graduate students prepare for their PhD translation exams. I also play a leadership role beyond the Classics Department, working with other Language Program Directors to improve the working conditions of contingent faculty in all language programs at Yale. At the moment we are working on guaranteed travel funds, increased access to course releases, summer funding for curricular development, a streamlined promotional process, and phased retirement. If I am elected Director of Contingent Faculty, these are items I would continue to fight for, and I would do so by teaming up with colleagues in other fields to increase our chances of making sweeping institutional changes. It should no longer be the case that the quality of our work life depends on whether our colleagues take contingent faculty seriously or not.
Rebecca Sears
Senior Lecturer in Classics, Washington University in St. Louis
I am honored to have been nominated as a candidate for the second SCS Contingent Faculty Director. I have been full-time non-tenure track non-permanent faculty in Classics for my entire teaching career (Lecturer at University of Michigan, 2012-2013; Visiting Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University, 2014-2015 and Tulane University, 2015-2018; Lecturer and Senior Lecturer, at Washington University in St. Louis, 2018 to present), typically teaching a 3-3 load with anywhere from 4 to 6 preparations each year. In my career, I have taught over 20 different courses, and developed or significantly redesigned 9 courses in 6 years at Washington University. My current appointment is unusual for a contingent role in that I routinely teach graduate students (including our department’s required seminar on Classics Pedagogy) and have the opportunity to serve on MA and PhD committees and supervise MA theses. However, in my teaching career, I have experienced a variety of types of positions and institutions, with varying levels of institutional support, and taught a diverse range of students and subjects.
In addition to my teaching commitments, I have remained active as a researcher in my areas of interest (ancient music, Latin poetry, reception studies), presenting papers regularly at both SCS and CAMWS annual meetings and maintaining membership in the SCS, CAMWS, and MOISA. I am currently Copy Editor of Greek and Roman Musical Studies, the only journal specifically dedicated to the study of ancient music. I also currently serve on the SCS Contingent Faculty Committee (since January 2023), where I have taken a leadership role in the future of our mentoring program and plan to speak about this process in the COGSIP workshop at the upcoming SCS Annual Meeting in Philadelphia.
If I am elected as the next Contingent Faculty Director, I intend to prioritize supporting contingent faculty as valued and essential members of their institutions and professional field. As the percentage of contingent faculty positions continues to grow and our responsibilities expand and diversify, the most important issue facing professional organizations like the SCS is how to best support their members who hold such positions. This begins with an issue that the Contingent Faculty Committee is currently exploring with the SCS Data Committee: obtaining an actionable picture of what contingency in our field currently looks like and crafting a coherent and expansive definition of contingency within Classics. Occupying a contingent position is no longer merely a temporary step to the tenure track, but is often a viable, and even a preferred career path, especially for scholars with deep commitments to pedagogy. Given the increasing challenges to the traditional model of a (tenure track) academic career, it is essential that the SCS examines how to make careers in contingent positions more sustainable and equitable for Classics as a field. This may include addressing how and where the SCS can advocate for increased transparency and consistency in contingent positions, beginning to build a mechanism for supporting advancement and promotion within contingent careers, integrating Classics-specific pedagogy more coherently into the Annual Meeting and training for our graduate students, exploring how to address the research needs of contingent faculty outside traditional institutional models, and providing resources to support the sometimes severe needs experienced by contingent faculty.
Nominating Committee
Seth Bernard
Professor, Department of Classics, The University of Toronto
I am a lifetime member of the SCS, and I attended my first annual meeting in 2006. I am also a lifetime member of the AIA. I think that dual membership is a good place to start making my pitch: for me, a critical aspect of our discipline is its very considerable methodological breadth. I teach in one of the largest departments in North America, but I started at a small liberal arts college, and I know that even the smallest departments bring together faculty working in very different ways. We inhabit a wide field, and to do our jobs well, we often put on the many hats of linguists, literary critics, historians, gender scholars, anthropologists, textual editors, and archaeologists. I do this in my research; I have worked on everything from Roman historiography to climate science, and I co-direct an archaeological project in Italy. But what is most important to me is that I’m not all that unusual in that respect. Our field encompasses dazzling interdisciplinarity, and this forms one of our greatest strengths as a community of researchers and teachers.
As member of the nominating committee, my goal is to see our extraordinary diversity reflected on our many service committees. For us, diversity comes in so many forms. I want to see us maintain our organization’s recent, vital commitment to including historically underrepresented or minority members. We also need to reflect diversity of professional rank or institutional background. This means seeking out scholars from all career stages and from institutions of all shapes and sizes; it also means finding equitable ways to include the voices of contingent and independent scholars. And then, as I alluded to, it is critically important to capture our intellectual diversity and all the very many sub-disciplines represented by our membership. I want to see our organization’s leadership embodying the richness of both its membership and the breadth of its intellectual vision – these are absolutely critical assets in today’s academic landscape. I look forward to drawing on my own wide professional and personal networks to help put our best feet forward in these regards.
Jackie Elliott
Associate Professor, Department of Classics, University of Colorado Boulder
To remain vital, the SCS must harness the energy and embrace the perspectives of as various and as committed a group of participants as possible. Individuals of differing identities and cultural backgrounds are needed to support communication and collaboration at their best across the field, as are persons at different career stages, active across the full range of fields of specialization and areas of commitment, in different geographical regions, at different types of institution, and in different relationships to those institutions. The task of the Nominating Committee as I see it is defined by the imperative to ensure that all these voices be present to be heard.
I would welcome the opportunity to serve the SCS as it continues to evolve. In my work to date, I have consistently been active in service at the professional, institutional, and local levels, and that work has kept me in touch with a wide range of interlocutors. My roles, including as editor and in departmental service, have given me the means and motivation to cultivate modes of efficiency, fair-mindedness, and engagement to which I am committed. I look forward to continuing to broaden what I know in all its dimensions, in the interests of helping secure a future for the field in which all perspectives and contributions are fully valued and can in turn enrich the intellectual-institutional community they help constitute.
Lauren Ginsberg
Associate Professor of Classical Studies, Duke University
The SCS leadership needs candidates prepared to think carefully and strategically about key issues facing our field, especially how best our organization can support its members facing the radically shifting legal landscape around equity and inclusion on many of our campuses as well as those colleagues facing precarious employment due to institutions’ increasing reliance on contingent labor. The nominating committee will continue to play a key role in finding individuals who can address these challenges head on through inclusive, equity-minded leadership and, equally importantly, in recruiting candidates from the broadest constituency we can including candidates from institutions in different regions, of different sizes, and with different mandates (e.g. RI, SLAC, regional publics, community colleges, etc.). As a member of the nominating committee, my chief priority would be working to ensure that those asked to stand for SCS positions reflect a broad constituency of colleagues in terms of department and program, institution type, employment rank, geography, and more. This means being strategic: not only thinking of whom to approach when a certain position becomes open, but taking the time during my term to talk to and recruit potential nominees well in advance, to understand pressures of timing and workload (‘not this year, but maybe next’) as well as to understand the many real barriers that may prevent excellent candidates from considering such roles (and then, hopefully, working to lower them!). To do this, I would engage in longer conversations within and beyond the committee about how individuals’ talents, interests, and pressures might best translate to key positions within our organization.
During my five years on the Managing Committee of the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies (‘the Centro’), I have experience with exactly this kind of work: when constituting the annual election slate for this committee itself, we engage in serious discussion about how best to represent a broad constituency of our member organizations. So too when recruiting and hiring faculty to teach at the Centro, we think holistically about the makeup of the faculty group as well as how individual faculty leaders will shape the experience our students have in any given year. My own career has taken me to a variety of places, including k-12 teaching at a public school, two small liberal arts colleges, a public and now a private R1 institution and these experiences have given me a broad view of how Classics is taught in communities across North America as well as of the challenges facing colleagues doing this work. My work in outreach through the SCS’s Ancient Worlds/Modern Communities Committee and through departmental and individual programs has broadened this view even further. As a member of the nominating committee, I would work to help find the next generation of leaders who are committed to equity-minded leadership, public outreach beyond the walls of the academy, and a broad view of what Classics is and can be.
Catherine Keane
Professor, Department of Classics, Washington University
I have previously served the SCS in several capacities, including on the WCC Steering Committee, the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups, and the Committee on Professional Ethics. I also note my time on the ICCS Managing Committee and my recent role as local liaison for meetings of both the ACL and CAMWS, which gave me valuable experience working with and observing classicists of all stripes. And as an SCS member for over twenty-five years, I’ve prioritized being a good listener, learning from colleagues who represent the full range of professional experiences, identities, and geographical regions that our organization must zealously represent and empower. In recent years – arguably the hardest of all our lives – I have been awed by what so many members have been able to accomplish in research, outreach, and collaboration. Many are simultaneously experiencing uncertainty in their professional paths and marginalization in the profession, yet they are throwing themselves into making Classics a better field all the time. At home, I have served a term on our school’s Faculty Council and two terms as department chair; in both roles, I had to regularly tap colleagues for service contributions while pondering how to balance institutional and individual needs.
I deeply appreciate the way that – ideally – professional service can generate benefits in both directions: while the trains are kept running and the organization improved, the individuals involved gain insights and skills that can help them in their careers and communities. The Nominating Committee can emphasize this dual benefit when tapping candidates for service roles; for some people a meaningful professional role can become transformative. That said, service is service. Most of our colleagues are already overburdened at home, and many of the best people are reluctant to say “no” when they need to, so the committee must proceed carefully. If elected, I would do my part to identify candidates, both younger and more seasoned, who could not just benefit the SCS, but who could truly benefit themselves from the right experience at the right time. I will continue listening, and looking for members whose diverse perspectives may not yet be well known, but whom we should all be proud to have representing the field.
Program Committee
Catherine Gilhuly
Professor of Classical Studies, Wellesley College
In the wake of the decoupling of the hiring process from the annual committee meeting, the SCS has been challenged to rediscover its raison d’être. Great strides have been made in making the programming formats more flexible, and yet there is still more work to be done to reinvigorate the meeting. If elected to the program committee, I would work to attract scholars at all stages of their careers to share cutting edge research. I would prioritize enhancing the in-person meeting experience by showcasing innovative scholarship that is moving the field in new directions from the inside out, tapping into the wellsprings of energy that animate recent work done on such topics as ecocriticism, temporality, and the embodied turn in the study of reading. This list is meant to be suggestive, not exhaustive, and indeed, I think it is important to have as wide a range as possible of perspectives at the meeting. While accessibility is also important, I would advocate moving away from the hybrid format for meeting panels, in favor of fostering distinct online and in person opportunities for interaction. To this end, I would like to explore the possibility of designated SCS sponsored online open access talks held off-cycle to provide options for those for whom winter travel is not feasible or practical.
As a full professor at Wellesley, a small liberal arts college, I have served on and been elected to administrative boards tasked with a range of assignments, from setting the agenda for college-wide faculty meetings, to evaluating peers for merit review. Of these various service roles, I have been most interested in those that involve reviewing scholarship, like evaluating fellowship applications for Wellesley's Humanities Center. Additionally, I have extensive experience reviewing articles for journals, monographs for presses, and I have regularly refereed for prize committees and evaluated applications for prestigious academic fellowships. I have organized and participated in numerous conferences that have culminated in edited volumes. I would be honored to put the experience I have gained in these roles in service of the program committee for the SCS.
Mira Seo
Vice Provost and interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies, Fulbright University Vietnam
For the last 10 years, I have been engaged in globalizing Classics through new curriculum development and institution building in Southeast Asia, first as an inaugural faculty member of Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and currently as Vice Provost and interim Dean of Undergraduate Studies at Fulbright University Vietnam. Although I have not been able to attend an SCS meeting during this time, I have broadened my own research by engaging in interdisciplinary curriculum building with colleagues across regions, and helped to develop a program in Global Antiquity that incorporates Classical Chinese, Sanskrit, as well as Greek and Latin. Our program has been active in collaborating with other institutions, including co-organizing a conference in Comparative Global Antiquity with the Humanities Institute at Princeton University. Before moving to Asia, I was active in the SCS on the Frank M. Snowden Scholarship and the Pearson Fellowship committees, and served as the job search advisor for graduate students at University of Michigan. While appointed at the University of Michigan, I participated in the Teagle Foundation’s National Forum for Liberal Education, and held fellowships at the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard, both of which strongly influenced my commitment to promoting Classics as a key convener of intellectual networks and discourses. This Fall I will be returning to the US to join the Classics department at Wesleyan as a Distinguished Provost’s Equity Fellow, and part of my responsibility will be to support Classics in its efforts to diversify and globalize within and beyond the University.
The SCS annual meeting is of course a dedicated conference for our own discipline, and allows colleagues to learn from each other and share our specialized research. If elected to the Program Committee, I would like to support submissions that demonstrate how Classics interacts effectively with other regions and disciplines for broader audiences, in addition to providing an essential venue for more specialized fields. Convening and generating unexpected conversations between unlikely interlocutors has been my focus for a long time in the global small liberal arts college context, and I would like the annual meeting programming to encourage these modes of intellectual outreach and curiosity within our own discipline as well.
Christopher van den Berg
Aliki Perroti and Seth Frank ’55 Professor in Classical Studies, Department of Classics, Amherst College
The annual meeting is a crucial venue for joining intellectual collaborators, developing new ideas and methods, and for critically exploring scholarly commitments. It is essential that we continue to think of how the SCS can evolve in light of new technologies for accessibility, the changing perspectives and needs of its younger members, and our duty to take seriously the society’s address to matters of public inquiry and debate in addition to its commitment to disciplinary expertise.
I have considerable programming experience that would be helpful for service on the Program Committee. I have co-organized several panels and seminars at the annual meeting as well as conferences and workshops; I have served several terms on the Advisory Board of my home institution’s Center for Humanistic Inquiry, and have also served as department chair (twice) and chaired or served on several major College committees. Next year I will begin my third year as Chair of the TLL Advisory Board and the TLL Fellowship Selection Committee, having served on the latter committee several times since begin an APA/NEH TLL Fellow in 2006-2007.
As a scholar of Greco-Roman rhetoric and, increasingly, the material contexts of literary-rhetorical theory, I am interested in two main questions: how can we further interdisciplinary connections with the AIA, and how have the technological constraints and innovations of the pandemic made it possible for us to offer programming we otherwise might not?
The following are, for me, crucial emphases in thinking about programming:
- To make the annual meeting as inviting and accessible as possible regardless of the technical or physical means by which our colleagues seek to attend.
- To foster diversity in the discipline by ensuring that newer perspectives and formats become a staple of the meeting’s offerings. So often diversity is excluded by reluctance to accept new approaches to scholarship and prudent scrutiny of how the field defines itself.
- To think critically about the scholarly exchanges available at the meeting and how innovative solutions can give voice to different individuals and groups while also challenging and advancing more traditional approaches and methods.
- To propose programming that can build bridges with other scholarly organizations or thinkers in fields adjacent to or even traditionally well outside of Classics.
- To promote the work of scholars who are invested in methodological innovation and who are seeking new forms in which to disseminate new knowledge.
- To give greater prominence to public-facing Humanities and Classics, including panels and workshops on public scholarship and for groups outside academia.
- To draw on the expertise present at the annual meeting to promote scholarly development at all levels, for example by soliciting workshops on article and book publication by journal or press editors, or by holding seminars on the use of the TLL or digital tools in epigraphy, papyrology, art history, and archaeology.
Katherine Wasdin
Associate Professor, Department of Classics, University of Maryland
I am honored to be nominated for the SCS program committee and, if elected, would be committed to ensuring that the annual meeting is intellectually stimulating and welcoming to all, regardless of identity or status. In recent years, I’ve been impressed with the growing range of affinity groups and organizer-refereed panels, which typically produce more coherent and collaborative sessions, increase the visibility of diverse and inclusive scholarship, and promote new areas of inquiry. Parallel to this has been the development of additional formats, such as seminars, roundtables, and lighting sessions. I think more might be done to assist applicants in crafting submissions for this wider range of options. For example, the suggestions on composing a traditional abstract could be supplemented with similarly detailed sections for panels and other formats in order to demystify the process for first-time applicants. I would also support continuing and, if possible, expanding the capacity for online attendance. I was unable to attend the past two meetings in person but found remote participation to be incredibly valuable. This experience has only strengthened my belief that the meeting should be accessible to all members, regardless of their ability to travel.
I would bring to the committee my experience of over two decades in the field as a scholar and administrator. My scholarly expertise is primarily as a philologist; I have published on both Greek and Latin literature, as well as in reception studies and pedagogy. In addition to frequent participation in the SCS annual meeting, I have organized panels at the SCS and CAMWS and evaluated abstracts for several years as a member of the CAAS program committee. In CAMWS, I currently serve on the Committee for Diversity and Inclusion and the Summer Travel Grants Committee, which I chaired in the past academic year. Additionally, I have participated in outreach to local middle and high school Latin teachers in Washington, DC and Maryland. At its best, our annual meeting brings us together to share and refine our work, while exposing us to cutting-edge scholarship, new approaches, and opportunities for professional development. I would be excited to help develop a program that meets the needs of all of our members and moves the SCS forward to meet the challenges ahead.
Goodwin Committee
Johanna Hanink
Professor of Classics, Assistant Provost for Faculty Community, Brown University
It is an honor to have been asked by the Nominating Committee to put my hat in the ring for the Goodwin Committee. In terms of qualifications, I have a fair bit of editorial experience and a good sense of the current challenges of putting out publications. I served as co-editor of the Journal of Modern Greek Studies for five years, and have co-edited both a volume and a special issue of a journal. Currently, I am a member of the inaugural board of Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for advanced study, whose mission is “to promote the public dissemination of academic research and scholarship.” I often serve as an external reviewer for monographs (for both US and UK presses) and journal articles, and I have advised more than a dozen PhD students: as primary adviser, committee member, and external reader. Finally, I have published books in a variety of genres: academic monograph, academic-trade “crossover,” and translation. (I am also currently working on a commentary that is under contract with an academic press.) I therefore have firsthand knowledge of the challenges that are particular to several of the forms of book writing that we see in our field.
As a member of the committee, I would do my best to be a careful, open-minded, and sympathetic reader, and to evaluate books on their own terms. I have no particular agenda here, except to do my part to ensure that the remit and criteria of the committee are followed. Membership on it would be an honor and responsibility that I would not take at all lightly.
Mario Telò
Professor of Classics, Comparative Literature, and Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
I am honored to accept the invitation to run for a position on the Goodwin Award committee. This would be a great honor and responsibility. I believe that values of inclusion and opennness—both ethico-political and methodological—should be integral to the committee’s decisions. The field is beginning to engage with varied critical methodologies—critical race theory, queer and trans* theory, disability studies, to name a few. In this time of global crisis, as our country faces the recrudescence of attacks against fundamental rights, this engagement, expressed in multifarious ways, promises to inform classics in the years ahead. While we continue to recognize scholarly work grounded in traditional disciplinary orientations, I believe we should also be strongly supportive of new directions and experimental works that take risks. The Goodwin Award could become a place where excellence is recognized in books that push against methodological constraints and blur boundaries within classics and the humanities as a whole.
James Uden
Professor of Classical Studies, Boston University
I am honored to stand for election to the Goodwin Award Committee, and it would be a privilege to recognize brilliant new scholarship that illuminates the ancient Mediterranean world and its imprint in more recent eras. As an SCS member, I was chair in 2020 of the Committee on Gender and Sexuality in Profession, and I am also the incoming coordinator of the John J. Winkler Memorial Essay Prize. In addition, over the past few years I have devoted an increasing amount of time to reviewing books in journals, refereeing manuscripts for publishers and editors, and writing assessments for grants and tenure cases. I see that work as one way to repay the help I received as a junior scholar. I also genuinely enjoy it: I love tracking the evolving conversations we have about the ancient world in our field.
My own scholarship explores Latin literature, cultural interaction in the Roman Empire, and the afterlife of antiquity in later periods. My first book was on Juvenal, and journal articles have encompassed Catullus, Virgil, love elegy, and fable. My second book, which won the Goodwin Award in 2022, explored the haunting of Gothic novels and poems in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the ghosts of ancient texts. My most recent scholarship relates to the history of medicine and the body in antiquity, and this research has brought me into contact with yet another fresh set of approaches and ideas. I would bring this breadth of curiosity to my task as judge. My aim would be to identify books – whether by junior or senior scholars, by people working within classics departments or outside of them – that push at the boundaries of what our discipline can include; books that inspire new approaches or break new ground; and books that could not have been written at any time but now.
Emily Wilson
College of Women Class of 1963 Term Professor in the Humanities, Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania
I am honored to be a candidate to serve on the Goodwin Prize committee. I work in a fairly wide range of sub-fields – epic, tragedy, ancient philosophy, reception studies, translation theory and praxis – and I have broad interests in ancient and later literatures and cultures. I have published both in scholarly and trade venues, and I have thought a great deal about how to write and tell stories about ancient texts and classical studies in different genres and for audiences. I have written a lot of book reviews in public-facing media, both of classics books and books in other fields. I have also done a lot of peer-reviewing on colleagues' books and articles. I have served on the Booker Prize Committee, which might be a partly analogous experience to this committee albeit in a different genre of book publishing, and which was pretty fascinating as a glimpse into how different readers think about literary excellence in contemporary fiction, how apples and oranges can be compared with pears, and how the generation of kleos works in one area of elite publishing. My long-standing experiences on committees in my home institution, and my many years of teaching, mentoring graduate students, and as Graduate Chair in Classics and Chair in Comparative Literature & Lit Theory here at Penn, have helped me understand how to be a productive member of a collegial team, and how to read scholarly work with both critical judgment and generosity.
I care a great deal about scholarship in ancient and comparative literary, cultural, and historical studies, and I would bring curiosity, attention, passion, knowledge, thoughtful judgment, and experience to the important task of judging the Goodwin Prize. It would be a privilege to serve alongside colleagues and help bolster the most worthy new scholarly work in the field at a time of great change and self-reflection.
Committee on Professional Ethics
Eunice Kim
Associate Professor of Classics at Furman University
I am honored to stand for election to the Committee on Professional Ethics. Throughout my early career (I will be Associate Professor of Classics at Furman University on August 1, 2024), my professional and volunteer activities have been devoted to cultivating a culture of belonging and facilitating the success of socially disempowered individuals, especially through mentoring. I currently serve as a peer coach in Furman’s Duke Leadership Peer Coaching program, through which I have gained extensive training and experience in facilitating a variety of observation and feedback processes for advising, DEI, and teaching initiatives. I am also a co-creator of both Furman University’s Hearst Fellowship, a mentorship program that helps underrepresented and first-generation students to secure engaged experiences, and the Women’s Classical Caucus’ (WCC) multi-pronged mentorship program, which includes year-long cohorts, short-term one-on-one matches by demand, and one-time pop-ups on special topics. I continue to serve the many communities I belong to through my work as a member of the WCC Steering Committee (2021-2025), first in the role of Mentorship Director (2021-2022), then Treasurer (2021-2023), and now Co-Chair (2023-2025).
Through all of the above activities, I have learned, experimented, and evolved in the ways I can most effectively advocate for unprotected members of the field, promote ethical conduct, and encourage constructive change. I am eager to bring these experiences to bear on the work of the Committee on Professional Ethics. My time with the WCC in particular has exposed me to many different institutional cultures, pressures, and situations of individuals from all career stages being subjected to unjust working conditions. As the field continues to move forward through this momentous state of transition, threats of exploitation, marginalization, and unethical conduct demand even greater vigilance and transparency in how we deal with them (without violating confidentiality), especially as local mechanisms or institutions of affected individuals may fail or lack the means to address such cases. Due to my training and professional experiences, I am practiced in serving as an impartial facilitator or observer, and I can apply the numerous observation and feedback processes I have implemented to cases that come before the committee. If elected, I will draw on my experiences as a mentor and peer coach to consider grievances, provide transparent reporting, and offer guidance to unprotected members of the field.
Francesca Martelli
Professor of Classics, University of California, Los Angeles
I am honoured to have been asked to put my name forward for the SCS Professional Ethics Committee. I have been a member of the Society for Classical Studies since 2013, when I flew in to the annual meeting (in Seattle) for a job interview that eventually led to a tenure-track position at UCLA. Having experienced an extensive period of precarious employment in the early phase of my career in the UK, I came to my tenure-track post in the USA all too familiar with the difficulties of adjunctification -- and familiar too with some of the ethical grievances that can accompany that phase of professional precarity (from misogyny to plagiarism). My story of professional insecurity is one that ended with a job interview organized and hosted by the SCS. Although I know I am one of the (very) lucky ones, I inevitably associate the SCS with that positive experience, and view it as a channel of professional transparency. This is what it can and should be. If I were elected to the Professional Ethics Committee, I would work to ensure that it served the most insecure scholars in our field to achieve the security and recognition they deserve. Having served as chair of the graduate program at UCLA, and having supervised a number of PhD students to completion, I have a vested interest in seeing the profession treat those it employs on short-term contracts as well as possible. It is important that they know that the Professional Ethics Committee exists for the possible event of a professional grievance.
Along with professional insecurity and matters arising from discrimination against scholars from underrepresented minority groups, which remain among the most pressing ethical issues of our profession, a further ethical issue which I see emerging currently stems from the creation of new archives and Classical communities online. As email threads and social media platforms play an increasingly visible role in our discussion of the field, they raise with them important ethical questions that we need to address as a group: for example, when we cite a social media platform as evidence of a critical position, should we identify the user by their actual name or by their username? And why does this matter? Amid the heightened polarisation that social media platforms frequently lend to any discussion, it is important that we find a way to address questions like this about the conventions by which we construct online archives and communities neutrally and with as much consensus as possible. The SCS Professional Ethics Committee can play a leading role in establishing guidelines and parameters for the formation of such archives. As a scholar with theoretical interests in the dynamics of social media systems (ancient and modern), I would be delighted and fascinated to contribute to this discussion.