Maia Kotrosits, The Matter of Form: Rewriting Our Way to a Changed Field
Keywords: academic writing, black studies, colonialism, crip theory, disability studies.
Abstract: This essay argues that the conventional and doctrinal forms in which we do our writing and thinking—because of their indebtedness to racializing, pathologizing, and colonial regimes—put limits on our ability to enact change, resistance, and abolition in our work. It suggests that we find our way to experiments in form, and thus to new possibilities for thought and relation, through mundane interruptions in our abilities to reproduce such forms, as well as through other departures from the over-performed and idealized hyper-rationalism of academic work.
Keywords: ancient Mediterranean religion, epigraphy, manumission, metaphor, slavery.
Abstract: In this article, I offer a critique of a common trend in classical and religious studies scholarship: the treatment of human enslavement to deities as fictional, metaphorical, or otherwise unreal. In conversation with postcolonial and feminist historiographical and philosophical interventions, I explore what assumptions operate in metaphorizing or fictionalizing ancient Mediterranean deities and their role in socioeconomic affairs, including slavery. After providing an overview of how historians and philosophers have challenged some Western historiographical norms that govern the treatment of deities as unreal, I examine inscriptions from three sites (Delphi, Leukopetra, and the Bosporan Kingdom) and how the sale, dedication, and enslavement of humans to deities occurs. I end by analyzing how scholars have often continued to treat such inscriptions, noting how there tends to be a common reading of enslavement to a deity as fictional or a religious smokescreen.
Keywords: language pedagogy, second language acquisition, grammar and translation method, active Latin, communicative method, Prussian method.
Abstract: The way the classical languages are traditionally taught can constitute a barrier to the entry to the field for many students. This piece reviews the history of language pedagogy over the last two centuries (starting with the Prussian school reform), and makes the case for embracing more progressive approaches to teaching Greek and Latin, informed by contemporary linguistics and second language acquisition studies. It includes a discussion of existing barriers to change, suggestions on how to implement small incremental changes in the classroom, as well as a conversation with an expert who has shifted to teaching Latin communicatively.
Erin Lam, Minoritizing Classics
Keywords: disciplinary humility, decolonizing classics, minoritized knowledges.
Abstract: This piece is a call-to-action for those who work with ancient greco- roman material, often identified as “classicists,” to minoritize the field of classics by adopting a stance of disciplinary and individual humility. This includes critically examining the assumption that classics is exempt, or will even benefit, from the political persecution of racialized, queer and trans, disabled, and other minoritized populations. Current diversification attempts to combat this state of affairs by incorporating minoritized viewpoints via reception, though well meaning, ultimately bolster the colonial supremacy of the discipline. Minoritizing classics requires a varied, widespread, and communal imaginative labor aimed at completely revising the hierarchized valuation of greco-roman material and classical (philological) methodologies.
Res Difficiles | Difficult conversations in classics 