"When Ted Pappas returned to Greece last summer he took 'Electra' with him. 'I studied it in Greek under an olive tree on my property,' says Pappas, who is directing the Pittsburgh Public Theater production of 'Electra' that begins performances Thursday at the O'Reilly Theater, Downtown." Read more at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review online.
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In support of racial justice, the SCS Executive Committee has approved donations to the National Bailout Collective and African American Policy Forum. Many thanks to SCS members who suggested these organizations. The SCS Executive Committee has also approved a donation to the William Sanders Scarborough Fellowship Fund of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens.
Dear members and past annual meeting attendees,
Many thanks to all of you who filled out our recent virtual annual meeting survey. Based on your feedback, AIA and SCS have decided that it would be best to spread a virtual meeting over six days from January 5 -10, 2021. We plan on opening registration on or around October 1, 2020 and will publish registration rates by early September. We have begun work on a schedule and appreciate your patience as we continue to work on the logistics and program.
Helen Cullyer, Executive Director, SCS
Rebecca King, Executive Director, AIA
GREEK LITERARY TOPOGRAPHIES IN THE ROMAN IMPERIAL WORLD
The Pennsylvania State University, 16-18 April 2021
Workshop Organizers:
Anna Peterson, Penn State
Janet Downie, UNC-Chapel Hill
Keynote Speaker:
Jason König, University of St. Andrews
Confirmed Speakers:
Pavlos Avlamis
Artemis Brod
William Hutton
After many years of offering free language courses to students of popular modern languages such as French, Spanish, Chinese, and German, and to people interested in learning rather more obscure languages such as Esperanto, Klingon, High Valyrian, and Navajo, Duolingo added a Latin course. The course was prepared for Duolingo by the Paideia Institute and was road tested by a group of Duolingo learners before it was made available to the general public. For the past eleven months the Duolingo Latin course has been available for free across all iOS and Android apps as well as on the Duolingo website.
The Department of Latin Literature at the University of Basel, Switzerland, is pleased to invite applications for the second round of the Basel Fellowships in Latin Literature. The Visiting Fellowship programme offers an opportunity for early career researchers as well as established scholars to pursue their research in the framework of a fully funded visit of up to three months at the Department Altertumswissenschaften of the University of Basel. During their stay Visiting Fellows are entitled to make full use of the excellent resources of the University Library as well as the departmental library, Bibliothek Altertumswissenschaften, one of the world’s leading research libraries for the study of Ancient Mediterranean Civilizations and the Classics.
The National Humanities Alliance has been researching the field of undergraduate humanities recruitment for more than a year now, identifying compelling initiatives, effective strategies, and leaders in the field. The pandemic, severely strained budgets, and the national reckoning with racial injustice are changing the context in which colleges and universities grapple with strategies for recruiting students to the humanities. NHA has invited deans and humanities center directors to talk with them about how this new context affects their efforts to promote the value of studying the humanities to undergraduates.
The View from the Dean's Office
Tuesday, July 28th, 1:00 pm, EDT
Deans from a range of institutions will share the recruitment strategies they’ve honed and how they intersect with the current moment.
Panelists:
Jeffrey Cohen, Dean of Humanities, Arizona State University
Lena Hill, Dean of the College, Washington and Lee University
Debra Moddelmog, Dean, College of Liberal Arts, University of Nevada, Reno
Moderator: Scott Muir, Project Director, Study the Humanities, National Humanities Alliance
Identity in Vergil: Ancient Representations, Global Receptions
Symposium Cumanum 2021
June 23-26, Villa Vergiliana, Cuma
Co-Directors: Tedd A. Wimperis (Elon University) and David J. Wright (Fordham University)
Vergil’s poetry has long offered fertile ground for scholars engaging questions of race, ethnicity, and national identity, owing especially to the momentous social changes to which his works respond (Syed 2005; Reed 2007; Fletcher 2014; Giusti 2018; Barchiesi forthcoming). The complexities of identity reflected in his corpus have afforded rich insights into the poems themselves and the era’s political milieu; beyond their Roman context, across the centuries his poetry has been co-opted in both racist and nationalist rhetoric, and, at the same time, inspired dynamic multicultural receptions among its many audiences, from Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech to Gwendolyn Brooks’ The Anniad (e.g. Thomas 2001; Laird 2010; Ronnick 2010; Torlone 2014; Pogorzelski 2016).
The new Classics Everywhere initiative, launched by the SCS in 2019, supports projects that seek to engage communities worldwide with the study of Greek and Roman antiquity in new and meaningful ways. As part of this initiative the SCS has been funding a variety of projects ranging from reading groups comparing ancient to modern leadership practices to collaborations with artists in theater, music, and dance. This post centers on two performances of ancient plays that were canceled when the pandemic put a halt to them last March.
"The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) announced today that it will redirect the funding focus of the ACLS Fellowship Program to support early career, non-tenured scholars exclusively."
You can read more about the program here.
Fighting racism, or any wicked, wrongheaded, or simply false idea, demands persuasion, person to person. All non-violent activism and efforts at social change depend on rhetoric. It is fashionable now to believe that persuasion—the political kind, anyway—is something of a mirage, that much of our thinking is “motivated,” driven primarily not by argument and evidence but by self-interest, tribal loyalties, enduring personality traits, and demographic facts. Identity comes first; the rationalizations that make us feel that we are correct in our prejudices hobble along after. This is the argument of Ezra Klein, for example, based on many psychological and political science studies, in Why We’re Polarized (2020). The role of rhetoric in this model is not to persuade, but rather to activate and weaponize identities and their powerful latent drives. Politics in this view is best understood not as reasoned civic dialogue but as a high-stakes all-in partisan combat. Persuasion exists, but as a dog tied to the cart of identity group competition—so say the studies.
