Editors' Note

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Editors' Note

for this issue's paragraphos, we commissioned a piece on "Race, Recovery, and Hope," jointly authored by Bridget Murnaghan (SCS President 2020) and Shelley Haley (SCS President 2021), to reflect on the two consecutive presidential panels, focused respectively on William Sanders Scarborough (SCS 2021) and Helen Maria Chesnutt (SCS 2022), dedicated to race and the discipline of Classics. The forthcoming special issue of TAPA, "Race and Racism: Beyond the Spectacular," edited by Sasha-Mae Eccleston and Patrice Rankine, will continue the work of interrogating racism and exclusion in the discipline and mapping both intellectual histories and future disciplinary outcomes.

At the same time as we draw attention to ongoing concerns of race in the discipline, we offer this issue of TAPA with significant concern surrounding gender. The recent pool of submissions has lacked the gender diversity we expect, and is far more skewed than the 60/40 split between men and women that has roughly characterized SCS annual meeting submissions and TAPA submissions and publications in the past. While this basic imbalance itself is problematic, what we have seen in recent submission pools is a cause for even greater alarm. We have initiated an internal review of our process, while recognizing that the principal source of the problem is not a mystery: the pandemic has exacerbated the challenges for caregivers in the labor force generally, and its disproportionate effect on women in academia—and especially women with children—has been widely observed. We do not cite this fact to evade responsibility, but to assume it: as a journal that aims to publish the best in Classics research, TAPA fails in its mission if it does not publish work by authors of all genders, races, and backgrounds.

We know there is more to do. We are eager to partner with SCS members and the broader TAPA readership to identify ways to support greater gender diversity in the journal. This includes improving our mechanisms for collecting anonymized data to ensure that trans, genderqueer, and nonbinary authors are adequately represented. We invite thoughts as to how to do this, and more broadly, how to contend with the extraordinary burdens—which the pandemic has only increased—on the time and energy of scholars with caregiving responsibilities. How can we recognize and encourage the contributions [End Page ix] of scholars of all genders in the journal? We will be holding open houses throughout the year to learn from authors, readers, and SCS members. We invite all to share feedback with us by email (tapa@princeton.edu). [End Page x]

Copyright © 2022 Society for Classical Studies ...