Distinguished Service Award
2023 Award Citation
Shelley P. Haley is a guiding light for generations of scholars studying Greco-Roman antiquity and a continuing inspiration for those historically excluded from the field. Informed by deep expertise in Roman culture as well as her own struggles against an anti-Black academy, Professor Haley (now Edward North Chair of Classics and Professor of Africana Studies Emerita at Hamilton College) has forged new and necessary bridges among classical studies, Critical Race Theory, Africana Studies, and Black feminism. She also, as our first Black president, guided the Society for Classical Studies through its most challenging but generative years, following racist incidents at our 2019 annual meeting and calls for social and epistemic justice in the wake of Black Lives Matter and the #metoo movement. During her three-year tour of duty as President-elect (2020), President (2021), and Immediate Past President (2022), she proved a visionary leader who never shied away from being as frank as necessary to shake us out of our complacency. The field of classical studies, and its future in our diversifying world, owe an immeasurable debt to Professor Haley and the scholars she has mentored and inspires.
During her presidency and throughout her career, Professor Haley has spearheaded disciplinary efforts to give credit where credit is due, especially when long denied. She notes that Frank M. Snowden, Jr. was the first person of African descent elected to the presidency of the then-APA in 1986, though he was unable to assume office because of illness. Her 2022 presidential address called attention to the work that small liberal arts college faculty have done in making classics more accessible, interdisciplinary, and inclusive, long before research institutions gained headlines for following in their footsteps. Her research, teaching, and advocacy have highlighted and honored the ancestors who came before us: all those mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, whose names are not featured on reading lists but were nonetheless essential in creating, transmitting, and forging renewed meaning and community through a global understanding of Mediterranean antiquity. These ancestors include trailblazing figures such as Fanny Jackson Coppin, Helen Maria Chestnutt, and Anna Julia Cooper. Their lives and accomplishments now enjoy greater visibility among the SCS’s membership in no small part because of Professor Haley’s brilliant and original work.
Shelley Haley’s ancestors, and those who have sustained the Society for Classical Studies, include enslaved, oppressed, and unsung people: people who creatively, ingeniously, and bravely used available mechanisms to resist racist power structures and epistemologies in order to build better futures for their descendants. Though this ethos is only one aspect of Prof. Haley’s groundbreaking work, it is a lantern for classical studies in its ongoing struggle to transcend its elitist past toward a more ecumenical and equitable future. It is in keeping with the spirit of historical justice Professor Haley has modeled that the Society for Classical Studies bestows upon her its Distinguished Service Award. With this award, guided by Prof. Haley’s moral and intellectual compass, we affirm our commitment to fostering epistemic and racial justice in classical studies and to embracing the perspectival shifts and truth-telling in the face of long-held assumptions that Prof. Haley has modeled with such generosity, humanity, and heroism.
