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: Addressing the Divide Between Ancient Near Eastern Studies and Classics
By Catherine Bonesho | February 7, 2019
'Addressing the Divide' is a new column that looks at the ways in which the modern field of Classics was constructed and then explores ways to identify, modify, or simply abolish the lines between fields in order to embrace broader ideas of what Classics was, is, and could be. This month, Prof. Catherine Bonesho, an Assistant Professor at UCLA who specializes in the ancient history of Judaism and the Near East, speaks to classicist and Herodotus scholar Prof. Rachel Hart.
Blog: Valuing Classical Translations for Outreach, Diversity, and Art
By Diane Rayor | January 31, 2019
Literary translation is a scholarly and a creative act in which a reader of the Greek or Latin becomes the writer for new readers. Like all readers, translators interpret the text, and in the field of classics, apply their scholarship and their poetic abilities to put the text into a modern language. Since many readers of our translations cannot read the original, they depend on us to transmit the voice of the original writer and to be transparent in our choices. By that I mean that the translator should proclaim whether the translation is aiming for accuracy (and what that means in particular), whether it adds or subtracts from the source text (such as Richmond Lattimore inserting his own lines into Sappho’s fragments), whether the work is an adaptation rather than a translation (clearly proclaimed in Luis Alfaro’s “Mojada: A Medea in Los Angelos”).
Blog: Classics and the “Flyover States”: Remembering the Morrill Act in Middle America
By Matthew Loar | November 15, 2018
At last year’s SCS annual meeting in Boston, the Program Committee sponsored a panel called “Rhetoric: Then and Now.” Among the speakers constituting that panel was Princeton University Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who, in lamenting the “inadequacy” and “meagerness” of a number of recent efforts in the field to diversify and expand access, delivered the following provocation: “perhaps it is time for this contemporary configuration of Classics to die so that it might be born into a new life.”
Blog: Flight of the Concordances: Resurrecting the Classical Concordance Online
By Christopher Francese | April 22, 2018
Blog: Being An Independent Scholar in Classics
By Ann Raia | February 1, 2018
Another of our new monthly columns here on the SCS blog explores the contributions of independent scholars within classics. There is a thriving community of classicists outside of the university system who, while often overlooked, are integral to the strength and survival of our field.