Blog: Teaching in a Time of Anti-Asian Violence: Reflections on Asian & Asian American Experiences in Classical Studies, Part 2
By Kate Brassel | July 8, 2022
This is a two-part blog post reflecting upon AAPI experiences in classical studies. Part 1 reflected upon the author’s personal experience teaching race & ethnicity in antiquity in the context of the ongoing surge of anti-Asian violence in the country. Part 2 reflects upon the shared experiences of students and scholars of Asian descent in classical studies through a series of interviews.
Curious about whether other people of Asian descent in Classical Studies have had experiences similar to mine and how that affects our lives in the field, I reached out this spring to scholars and students from other institutions in North America, public and private, large and small, through the recently formed Asian & Asian American Classical Caucus (AAACC).
Blog: Teaching in a Time of Anti-Asian Violence: Reflections on Asian & Asian American Experiences in Classical Studies, Part 1
By Kate Brassel | June 27, 2022
This two-part series reflects upon AAPI experiences in Classical Studies. Part 1 is catalyzed by the author’s personal experience teaching race & ethnicity in antiquity in the context of the ongoing surge of anti-Asian violence in the country. Part 2 will reflect upon the shared experiences of students and scholars of Asian descent in Classical Studies through a series of interviews.
“Do you know about your Penn Law School colleague Amy Wax?,” a friend texted me in January, as the semester was starting.
Blog: Call It What It Is: Racism and Ancient Enslavement
By Javal Coleman | December 13, 2021
To say that there was such a thing as racism in classical antiquity would strike most modern readers as odd. However, if we examine what racism means, it is not as striking. The modern connotations of “racism” often instantly call up differences in biological features such as skin color. Historians of antiquity, such as Frank Snowden, have examined ancient evidence in search of racial hatred, working from these modern assumptions about what “race” is. Given those assumptions, Snowden concluded that the ancients did not have an idea of racism or hatred of black people more specifically.
Blog: Dissertation Spotlight: Racialized Commodities: Thinking about Trade, Mobility, and Race in the Archaic Mediterranean
By Christopher Parmenter | September 27, 2021
One of the fascinations occupying Classical Studies in North America and Western Europe during the 1980s and 1990s was the way images refract the particularities of societies that produce them. One look at the imaginary of sixth- or fifth-century Athens would provide you a blistering array of human forms: doughty warriors, mourning women, drunken gods; the young and the old, Greek and barbarian. This last pair seemed especially interesting at the twilight of the Cold War.
Blog: Women in Classics: A Conversation with Shelley Haley: Part II
By Claire Catenaccio | January 13, 2020
Our second interview in the Women in Classics series is with Shelley Haley, Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College. This is the second of a two-part interview with Prof. Haley, which picks up at the point when she decided to apply to graduate school to study Classics.
CC: How did you decide to apply to graduate school?
Blog: Working Toward a Just and Inclusive Future for Classics
By Joy Connolly | February 15, 2019
Like many others, I'm trying to funnel the anger and frustration that I felt at our panel on the "Future of Classics" at the Annual Meeting in San Diego toward taking action that can make a difference, even on a small scale. At the panel Professor Sarah Bond and Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta promptly condemned the comments a speaker from the audience made about Dan-el as well as her intellectually and politically regressive defense of classical studies. My thoughts here are intended to carry forward their energetic advocacy.
Blog: A Roundup of Reports, Reactions, and Reflections After the SCS Annual Meeting
By Sarah Bond | January 18, 2019
It has now been a month since the SCS-AIA annual meeting in San Diego, and many have written evocative, emotional, and important pieces about the racist events that occurred there. Instead of posting each separately on our social media or blog, I have tried to compile as many as I could in this post.
In their own words:
Dan-el Padilla Peralta, “Some thoughts on AIA-SCS 2019,” Medium (January 7, 2019).
Blog: Archaeology and Aliens: Teaching the Myth of Atlantis
By Ana Maria Guay | December 13, 2018
A recent surge of critical focus on pseudoscience and classics focused on issues from Hippocrates and scientific racism to the racial bias of Ancient Aliens sees scholars doing the work to convince our field that classicists, historians, and archaeologists ought to take action to address the dissemination of pseudoscientific views in popular media.[1] Yet once we’ve accepted that we should confront pseudoscience in classics and archaeology, we find ourselves confronted with a rather different question: how can we best teach this in our classrooms?
Blog: What a Difference an ἤ Makes: Hippocrates, Racism, and the Translation of Greco-Roman Thought
By Lisl Walsh | November 1, 2018
As Benjamin Isaac concisely stated in a 2016 piece in Eidolon,[i] the “pseudo-scientific roots” of American racism can be traced back to Ancient Greek theories of human difference. A crucial text quoted at length by Isaac is Airs, Waters, Places . Preserved as a medical document in the Hippocratic Corpus , this treatise argues that climate has a strong influence on human biology and human society: some climates are conducive to bodily health and social flourishing, while others are conducive to disease and lack of ‘civilized’ society. Isaac cites this text as foundational for the later development of theories of race: