What Is a Future for Classics?

Abstract

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

• What Is a Future for Classics?
• Erika Zimmermann Damer (bio)

I contemplate this question as a mid-career professor at a small liberal arts university in the mid-Atlantic, and I ask it mindful of the panel in our field that brought national attention to the future of Classics in 2019, and in conversation with critical dialogues that preceded and emerged from that panel, including those in this issue. From where I sit, Classics is both remarkably changed from my own experience as an undergraduate and graduate student, and quite recognizable. I am not certain that we are in crisis so much as in a moment with welcome changes happening across many parts of our lives as teachers, scholars, and as a learned community. The elements that bring students into a small liberal arts college program in Classics are much the same where I live as where I studied, but the ways we teach, the content we incorporate, and our methods of scholarly engagement have changed. Classics is by nature a conservative field, where our shared goal is to continue to introduce new generations of students and the public to the languages, cultures, and material remains of the ancient Mediterranean, especially that of Greek- and Latin-speaking spaces, and to maintain the ongoing textual and material transmission of a small slice of antiquity to our twenty-first-century communities. Thinking about this question brings me first to a gentle critique of classics pedagogy, and second toward looking at some of the new developments that can broaden the field.

First, I'd like to introduce a compassionate critique of our field. As a faculty member who also led the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program on my campus, and who co-teaches and writes with colleagues in other humanities disciplines, I have found that Classics still harbors some troubling values, including a propensity to value objective data over the human, embodied, sensory, emotional world. We overvalue formal written perfection over creative forms of inquiry, and we often reject knowledges from other fields in ways that isolate us from our peers in literary, performance, and cultural studies. In practice, this can mean that we teach a narrow canon of texts with both difficult and exclusionary pedagogy unrecognizable to our peers in modern languages. Our focus on prescriptive linguistic precision in understanding [End Page 47] Greek and Latin and our emphasis on errors in student's writing, in particular, align uncomfortably closely with elements of what Tema Okun (in 1999, revised in 2021) identified as white supremacy culture, or the systems of belief that normalize white middle- and upper-class values as universal, ideal, and dominant. These beliefs include perfectionism, that there is a single correct path, and avoidance or fear of conflict, and can stifle inventive, critical, and cooperative engagement with antiquity. At worst, we practice color-blind Classics, leaving unchallenged ideas purporting the centrality of Greek and Roman civilizations to later European and American cultures, and ignore the ethical imperative to acknowledge that race, race-making, and racism emerge both in the texts we study and teach and in those we exclude from our classes. At the same time, scholars and teachers around the country are rapidly shifting how we study and teach Classics in thrilling ways.

I'd like now to look at some new forms of scholarly engagement that would have been unrecognizable to me in the late 1990s, when I first started studying ancient Greek, and then Latin, at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. The first is the digital turn—and the types of collaborative, connected scholarship the internet has made possible. Bryn Mawr Classical Review has just celebrated thirty years of publishing reviews online, the Perseus Project is thirty-five, JSTOR is nearly thirty, and pandemic closures accelerated the speed at which a huge variety of texts, museum, and library resources became available online. These early digital humanities projects shaped how I became a professor and a scholar. These are such powerful tools connecting our field, and they grant such easy access to primary sources and scholarly thought, that my students often laugh at my expectation that they use print books in the library...