It seems appropriate to begin with a little orientation. I read these three volumes during the spring, when Lent and Ramadan overlapped. These annual religious seasons encourage believers to engage in self-examination and to seek growth in their faith lives. These books, fittingly enough, share a similar goal — to initiate a process of internal reflection in their readers, and to encourage them to implement changes accordingly. However, tolerance varies for the intensity of experience generated through any reflective process; that is why some devotional books offer gentle meditations and others unrelentingly dig right down into the spiritual viscera. So, too, the works considered here.
All three volumes bring together a range of perspectives on their subjects of enquiry. They each take the idea of positionality and that our own contexts shape our scholarship and pedagogy seriously; they seek to prompt adjustments and innovation in how we do what we do. Expanding Classics focuses on museums and schools in the United Kingdom; Diversity and the Study of Antiquity in Higher Education thinks about pedagogy in the North American and European HE classroom; Critical Ancient World Studies takes a much broader disciplinary view encompassing research, pedagogy and outreach work. The books are linked by a shared sense that doing things as they have always been done is not fit for purpose. That conviction emerges from various recent developments, including the visibility of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements; the wider drive to decolonise academia; and early signs of pushback against equality, diversity and inclusion work that were appearing around the time of publication.
However, to return to my analogy of spiritual self-examination, the volumes differ in the level of introspection they ask the reader to undergo. As educators, we know there is a sweet spot for learning where a learner is pulled beyond what is familiar, but not so far out that their brains shut down under the pressure of the unfamiliar. A degree of stress and discomfort is a prerequisite for growth. Yet just as someone choosing a devotional book will judge how much spiritual challenge they are able to undertake in a given season, so too may a reader feel they have limited capacity to engage meaningfully with the intellectual challenges posed by these three volumes. In an unstable socio-political context, both domestically and internationally, it may feel as if there is no energy left to read books which ask us to alter our behaviour. Conversely, one might argue these moments of crisis strengthen the imperative to enact radical change in response; yet a gentler approach may be more suitable for people who are burned and poured out.
And so to the books in hand. Expanding Classics focuses on practice-based research. The contributors include a number of teachers, and for many this is ‘their first peer-reviewed publication’ (3). The volume provides a valuable snapshot of actual classroom praxis as undertaken by those at the metaphorical sharp end. There is no idealism here about the British classroom; several contributions explicitly acknowledge the difficulties caused by significant resourcing pressure and the need to combat persistent myths about Latin or classical studies. Such honesty about the challenges faced by those seeking to bring classical studies into their teaching, as well the role played by luck and providence, is refreshing.
In ch.1, Arlene Holmes-Henderson outlines three different projects that brought Latin and/or Greek into UK primary schools. The data available to evaluate the projects’ success is not directly comparable; however, the available data point towards a link between the study of Latin and improved English literacy attainment, particularly among groups which usually experience significant learning gaps. Peter Wright follows in ch. 2 with a survey of Latin teaching in Blackpool, an area with significant deprivation, where Latin plays a major role in targeting challenges associated with socio-economic disadvantage, including expanding vocabulary range. Anna Bloor, Meghan McCabe and Holmes-Henderson use ch. 3 to outline a potential use of classical mythology, in this case the Odyssey, to support year 7 students learning English as an additional language (one of the beneficiary groups identified in ch. 1).
Alex Gruar takes a tour of school Latin textbooks in ch. 4, deftly indicating how simply increasing representation of BAME characters is insufficient to improve the diversity of teaching materials; to have an impact, such characters need to be properly developed and set in the context that draws on the full range of the evidence we have for different ethnicities and cultures in the Roman world. In ch. 5, Anna McOmish explains her school’s approach to embedding ancient history for their learners aged 11 to 14, including a unit on the Ancient Near East, to support Ancient History teaching for those who choose to pursue the subject, and offer a more diverse curriculum. Ch. 6 shifts focus to the Museum of Classical Archaeology and its cast gallery at Cambridge University; Susanne Turner outlines a range of initiatives that MOCA have undertaken in order to lower perceived barriers of entry into their collection, including annual Drink and Draw sketching evenings and initiatives to highlight LBGT+ stories. In the final chapter, Emma Payne and Laura Gibson introduce the Contested Collections project, an initiative run out of King’s College London that used student workshops to co-create a set of learning materials and 3D replica objects to help KS2 children explore issues around decolonisation and repatriation. The start of the COVID-19 pandemic delayed the planned distribution of the packs, so the chapter focuses on the process of designing and creating the resources.
Ch. 7 in fact highlights one of the major benefits of this volume, as I am unable to find any other reference to the Contested Collections project, not even a webpage. There may be more to come, but given the significant effort outreach projects require without guaranteed results, it is valuable to have the first stage of the project captured here. Similarly, activity located in schools is often hidden or invisible both to others based in schools and to people in HE who wish to collaborate with schools. Creating a record of this worthwhile activity and giving it a presence makes a valuable contribution to the scholarship in this area, and increases the representation of practitioners in the literature.
I move to Diversity and the Study of Antiquity in Higher Education. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I note that the project described in ch. 9 is based in my department, and that I am a very occasional participant in the initiative discussed in ch. 6.) The volume focuses on diversity both past and present at the tertiary level; this includes how diversity manifested among ancient communities, barriers to the subject and profession experienced by marginalised groups today, and curriculum content. Placing North American and European material in conversation within the same volume helpfully draws out not only the differences in our teaching environments, but the places where we can learn from each other about how we teach, how we research, and how we situate ourselves within and beyond our institutions.
Ch. 1 opens with Patrice Rankine’s reflections on how Classics as a subject fits into different sorts of US universities. Using responses to the closure of the department at Howard as a springboard, Rankine considers how Classics makes space for itself and contributes to institutional missions at Howard, Purdue and Georgetown. In ch. 2, Nadhira Hill considers various initiatives designed to create a more inclusive archaeology of the Mediterranean, with a focus on how to support scholars of colour to enter and continue within the field. T. H. M. Gellar-Goad and Caitlin Hines present the groundbreaking ‘Classics Beyond Whiteness’ project at Wake Forest in ch. 3; their department is the first in the world to require all majors and minors to take a module exploring critical race theory, race and ethnicity in the ancient world, and the history of Classics and white supremacy. Their advice to start small with wild optimism for the possible, given their own encounters with serendipity, offers genuine inspiration. Denise Eileen McCoskey focuses on Cicero’s Pro Fonteio as a teaching tool in ch. 4, drawing out how Cicero’s paradoxical acknowledgement and dismissal of the experience of Gauls colonised by the Romans helps students understand the role of law in perpetrating injustice. In ch. 5, Eleni Bozia outlines how she introduces first years at the University of Florida to Classics through a lens of diversity, foregrounding digital skill acquisition. Victoria Leonard showcases the #WCCWiki initiative in ch. 6, emphasising the importance of ensuring representation of women classicists and classicists of colour on Wikipedia; the pushback against biographical profiles on the grounds of ‘notability’ is sobering.
Samuel Agbamu places his own formative encounters with Classics alongside those of C. L. R. James, a Trinidadian Marxist, in ch. 7; by asking what it means for people of colour to work within Classics, and who should be doing the labour of diversity and inclusion, he argues for the importance of challenging diversity window-dressing and comfortable narratives of disciplinary prestige. Ellen Adams considers disability justice in ch. 8 through her work making museums and visual/material culture accessible through audio description and touch tours; she emphasises the importance of equipping students to meet the requirements of the UK’s 1995 Disability Discrimination Act. Ch. 9 introduces the ‘Myth and Voice’ project, an initiative run by Efrossini Spentzou which organises workshops for schools based on myth as a way to use story-telling and co-creation as tools for building confidence and self-development. Barbara Goff and Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis gather a set of short reflections from participants in a 2021 UK Classical Association panel exploring inclusive Classics in ch. 10. Major themes include recognising diversity in the ancient world and its receptions; centring that diversity; and responding to the varied needs of learners. The volume closes with Marisa Fountopoulou and Effrosyni Kostara’s description of a teaching methodology developed in Greece designed to draw out relevant issues from ancient materials, with a case study introducing the scheme to trainee teachers by addressing immigration through Euripides’ Trojan Women.
This volume’s tone is reflective and invitational, seeking to inspire readers based in HE to reexamine their own preconceptions and adjust their practice. Precisely what diversity means is handled somewhat unevenly throughout the volume. Some chapters are confident that teaching a wider range of material displaying diversity from antiquity is sufficient, while others question if this kind of modification is sufficient to address the deep inequities in our subject. Juxtaposing the two different approaches in the same volume encourages the reader to consider where they stand on the degree of change necessary to be meaningful, and how to take diversity beyond tokenism.
And so to the final book, Critical Ancient World Studies (CAWS). This volume surfaces the implicit tensions within Diversity and the Study of Antiquity in Higher Education; it offers a sustained and penetrating meditation on confronting injustice in the field and rejecting the centrality of Greece and Rome in the study of antiquity. It is by turns insightful, provocative, bold, ambitious, and difficult to read — not because of the pioneering theoretical frameworks deployed, but because of the uncompromising way the volume as a whole faces up to some difficult truths about Classics as a discipline. Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward lay out the beginnings of a manifesto for CAWS in ch. 1; it offers much to dwell upon, including a rejection of the universality (and implied importance) of classics, a search for ways other than supposed relevance or ‘heritage of the West’ to approach the discipline, and the pursuit of entirely new methods and epistemologies to structure a more decolonial, critical and just discipline. The contributors to the volume all engage with this agenda in meaningful ways, generating real intellectual coherence. The overall approach is unapologetically exploratory and imaginative, a significant point in its favour. Volumes which offer new visions of how our field must be constructed tend to appear in a blaze of glory and sink without a trace. This one offers a set of springboards and possibilities, of invitations for how things could be (and perhaps should be); the result is a sense of being caught up in a wave of forward momentum rather than the presentation of a foregone conclusion.
Following Umachandran and Ward’s exploratory manifesto, S. Sayyid and AbdoolKarim Vakil offer a comparative view from critical Muslim studies, which has been an inspiration for the CAWS project. Helen Wong puts theory into practice by considering how one might reconstruct the experience of diasporic Egyptian communities through the temples of Serapis on Delos in ch. 3. In ch. 4, Nicholas Chukwudike Anakwue considers the role of ancient Egyptian thought in the development of philosophy and calls for the acknowledgement of Egypt’s long intellectual tradition as a precursor to Greek philosophy. Ashley Lance addresses epistemic injustice in the Classics classroom in ch. 5, considering how an instructor might respond to issues raised by credibility deficits and excesses, and avoid exploitation of the oppressed to perform emotional labour. Krishnan J. Ram-Prasad articulates the potential contribution of comparative philology to the CAWS project in ch. 6, acknowledging both the role philology played in Nazi race science and its potential to eliminate any ideas of cultural superiority based on language; he speculates about the possibilities created by dissolving barriers between languages while acknowledging the practical challenges of implementing this within current university structures. In ch. 7, Hannah Silverblank offers the intriguing possibility of an anti-lexicon project, where constantly evolving co-created materials draw on a range of perspectives to find ways of capturing the meanings of Greek and Latin words which have become mired in nineteenth-century prejudice. Ella Haselswerdt develops the concept of Deep Lez Philology in ch. 8 and applies it to the fragments of Sappho, offering a more open way of reading which does not pin down some recoverable meaning or reduce explorations of desire to seeking our own images in a text.
Mathura Umachandran considers the politics of cartography in ch. 9 through a case study of the Barrington Atlas which convincingly outlines how colonial preoccupations shape visualisations of the ancient world with on-going consequences, such as the representation of Palestine. Lylaah L. Bhalerao challenges popular accounts of civilisation by exploring how UNESCO versions of the Parthenon’s history erase its Christian and Islamic pasts, in contrast to the reaction to the choice to foreground the Islamic history of the Ayasofya; she argues for developing ideas of multiple heritage as an alternative to a single, colonial, civilisational narrative. Marchella Ward considers temporality in ch. 11, inviting a more critical attitude to the assumptions made by linear time and its colonial roots, in particular how it conveniently sets certain things outside of ‘classics’ and contributes to a story of European supremacist progress. Ch. 12 contains Patrice Rankine’s sustained meditation on how the myth of Icarus, via the art of Michael Richards, helps articulate how Classics has failed Black communities, and what other routes might be available into the ancient histories of Kush, Carthage and classical West Africa. Holly Ranger offers an unflinching critique of white feminist approaches to classical reception in ch. 13, and illustrates how a preoccupation with liberatory reception in the work of Sylvia Plath obscures the poet’s collusion with racist ideology. Ch. 14 challenges the common assertion that Karl Marx’s dissertation on Democritean and Epicurean philosophies proves Classics has always been progressive as Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani explores what Marx actually said, drawing out how his philosophical conclusions are grounded in racist epistemology typical of the thought of his European contemporaries. Dan-el Padilla Peralta contributes a brief afterword which draws together the volume’s themes of seeing a critical approach as an ethical approach, and of relocating epistemic authority to marginalised scholars without gatekeeping that authority.
The depth and sustained nature of the project as a whole, to my mind, makes the time reading CAWS from cover to cover worthwhile. There will be things which resonate and others which jar, but the invitation of the volume to engage in the work of transformation matters if we as a discipline want to move towards a collective and just future. If a volume with the goals that CAWS has set itself does not generate some unease and resistance in its readers, then it has not achieved those goals. The places where discomfort emerges are, I suggest, an indication of where injustice sits, and the areas which require attention both on the individual and corporate level. Here is where I return to the appropriate temporal setting in which I read these books. A challenge to ethical standards is, of necessity, an unsettling thing. Self-examination, in this case of academic praxis, is meaningless if it does not generate insight into where the effort of improvement is needed. The option, of course, remains of shying away from that insight and deciding not to engage with it — but I wonder how it is possible to develop as a person, as a scholar, as a subject community if that path is taken. It is impossible to grow in meaningful ways if we are unwilling from time to time to put ourselves under the appropriate amount of pressure necessary for us to learn. The contributors to CAWS have done a valuable service in producing a theoretically and methodologically rigorous volume that generates such productive pressure.
