Beyond Reception: Addressing Issues of Social Justice in the Classroom with Modern Comparisons

This panelist discusses his approaches to teaching and discussing race and ethnicity in antiquity and its impact on modernity. Although it is important to teach about race and ethnicity in the ancient world, it is equally important to help students understand how many of the ideas from antiquity were developed by later students of the classics to create scientific theories of race in the 18th-20th centuries, especially in theories of environmental determinism, eugenics, and arguments for slavery in American history.

In the middle of a spring 2019 course entitled “Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World,” after a suggestion by Jason Nethercut on Twitter, I assigned as readings a fundamental work on Roman sexuality by Holt Parker entitled “The Teratogenic Grid” (1997) and an Eidolon article by Sarah Scullin entitled “Making a Monster” (2016), which examines reactions to and consequences of Holt Parker’s arrest for collecting and disseminating child pornography. In response to these readings, students brought in modern examples of “popular art, problematic artist” like R.

Over the last three years I have developed an upper division course on Migration in the Classical World and taught it to students at two different universities. My approach incorporates discussions of modern migration, particularly discussions of the US-Mexico border and migrations to Greece in the 21^st century to help students read ancient evidence in a more sensitive and informed manner. I begin the course with a short paper that asks students to read articles about contemporary migration and migrants and analyze the language used.

In courses on classical mythology and literature in translation, this panelist has introduced part of his own research on classical reception in early modern Spanish and Portuguese literatures of colonialization. In particular, I have my students read Luís Vaz de Camões’ Lusiads, a late 16th century epic poem in which the Olympic deities oversee Vasco da Gama’s attempt to discover a sea route to India and aid him when he is detained by local Muslim leaders in Calicut (modern Koshikode in the state of Kerala, India).

I will give an overview of my project, an online archive that documents hate-groups’ appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquity in support of white supremacy, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia, and anti-Semitism, and demonstrate its potential as pedagogical tool.

In my talk, I discuss the value of examining cross-dressing in teaching students about gender norms and gender nonconformity in the ancient world. Gender is a key component of identity that is often reflected in clothing. The distinction between men and women’s clothing is as true in antiquity as it is today; people are shocked, and even uncomfortable, when seeing someone whose clothing is considered inappropriate for their gender.