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.

Chance Bonar, Reconsidering the Fictionality of Enslavement to Deities in the Hellenistic and Roman East

 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.

Chiara Bozzone and Daniela Negro, When Learning Greek and Latin Became Hard, and What We Can Do About It

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 Diff 2.1 (2025) Complete Issue

 Arum Park, Chris Waldo, and Tori Lee, Introduction / Re(Orientation) 

Hardeep Singh Dhindsa, ‘Strange and Uncouth’: Exoticism and Orientalism in British Responses to the Eighteenth-Century Excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum

Keywords: colonial travel literature, Grand Tour, orientalism, primitivism.

Abstract: In the mid-eighteenth century, the Roman towns that were buried under the debris from the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE began to be excavated. The findings drew an unparalleled number of travelers to Naples, eager to visit the Bourbon excavations and see for themselves the remains of the best-preserved example of daily Roman life. The immediate impact that Pompeian wall paintings and decorative arts had on eighteenth-century interior design is well studied, but what remains relatively underexplored are the reactions of shock (and horror) to the artefacts being unearthed in towns like Pompeii and Herculaneum. Here I show how some British travelers understood the artefacts through a distinctly colonial lens. Some likened the vividly-colored wall paintings to Indian or Chinese art, while others were deeply disturbed by the proliferation of erotic statues which recalled the phallic objects described in recent reports from the South Sea islands. My research brings to light a different experience of the British Grand Tour, where travel to the Mediterranean drew heavily upon foreign tropes found in contemporary colonial travel literature.

Helen Wong, Classicizing Architecture and the Kaiping Diaolou: Diasporic Identity in Guangdong, China

Keywords: architecture, Classical reception, diaspora, migration, Neoclassical

Abstract: The county of Kaiping, located in Guangdong Province, China, is well-known for the local watchtowers called diaolou which are commonly found throughout its landscape. The diaolou is a form of defensive architecture first developed in the Ming era. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Kaiping saw a boom in diaolou building, accompanied by rising numbers of local people migrating to the West or Western colonial spaces in East Asia and then later returning home. The diaolou built during this period display a unique mix of Western architecture, often recognizably Classical or Classicizing, set in a traditional Chinese structure. This article argues that the reception of Western/Classical architecture in these buildings was multivalent, structured along the following themes. First, the Western/Classical references were not drawing from true antique Classical architecture, but rather, on contemporary Neoclassical architecture in Asian colonial spaces, Australia, and North America. Second, the designs of these buildings reference how their owners and builders experienced overseas migration into Western spaces during this period. And lastly, these diaolou have served as enduring foci of cultural memory regarding the diasporic experiences of the local community over time.

Maria Ma, “Time and again I hear the youths mutter”: Hybrid Traditions of Reception in Haizi’s To Sappho

Keywords: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, Haizi, Reception, Sappho.

Abstract: This article examines the contemporary poet Haizi’s response to a hybrid Chinese and Western tradition of mediating Sappho in his short poem To Sappho, and pays particular attention to the routes of transmission and translation through which Haizi encountered the Greek poet. For Haizi, Sappho comes to represent an elusive lyric ideal as he strives for affective poetic language in the wake of the Cultural Revolution’s impact on Chinese literature. Echoing and reconfiguring imagery from her available poetry and biography, Haizi domesticates Sappho into his symbolic, rural landscape of poetry, thereby creating a paradigm to contemplate his own poetic identity and legacy.

Dominic Machado, Tam magnus ex Asia veni: Towards an Asian American Hermeneutics in Classics

Keywords: Asian American hermeneutics, Aeneid, disciplinary reform, freedmen, Petronius, racialization, romantic capitalism.

Abstract: Riffing off Vincent Wimbush’s directive to consider Blackness in biblical studies, this article imagines what it might mean to center Asian Americanness in the study of the classics. I offer two brief case studies that offer one possible vision of what an Asian American hermeneutics for classics might look like. These two case studies focus on two Asian immigrants in Roman culture—Aeneas (as well as his fellow Trojans) in Vergil’s Aeneid and Trimalchio in Petronius’ Satyrica—and how reading them through an Asian Americanist lens can shed light on these figures and, more broadly, on contemporary Roman social, cultural, and political structures. The article concludes by considering the ethics that might attend further attempts at developing an Asian American hermeneutics in classics.

Res Diff 1.2 (2024) Complete Issue

Hannah Čulík-Baird and Joseph Romero, Co-editors’ Preface

Nicolette D’Angelo and Jonah Stewart, Reconceptualizing Difficulty in Classics Using Critical Pedagogical Approaches

Keywords: banking model, Classics teaching, conscientizaçao, critical pedagogy, Paulo Freire.

Abstract: This paper offers a critique of traditional Classics pedagogy which has been historically avoidant of pedagogical theories from other disciplines, such as Education. Resituating the bibliography of difficulty literature in Classics through the discursive frameworks of critical pedagogy advanced by scholars such as Paulo Freire, we examine Classics’ dependence upon a banking model of learning which positions students as empty vessels waiting to be filled by the authority of their teacher. Furthermore, we offer a critique of the prevailing pedagogical mode in Classics, which positions some students as the cause of “difficulty,” as a fundamentally managerial practice. Finally, we offer some reflections on the potential of conscientizaçao (“consciousness raising”) to chart a course for disciplinary change within Classics.

Kelly P. Dugan, Ancient Rhetoric, Abolition, and Reverend Peter Thomas  Stanford’s The Tragedy (1897)

Keywords: Black literature, ancient rhetoric, Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford, Herodotus, Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Abstract: Following the efflorescence of scholarship on Black freedom narratives and activism, this article examines Reverend Peter Thomas Stanford’s The Tragedy (1897), an antilynching text which recounts a history of colonization and enslavement from the Mediterranean in the 7th century BCE to America in the late 19th century CE. Together with a study of the ancient discourses, Rev. Stanford’s work is here situated in the context of the white paternalism of British and American publishing during the late 19th century, with particular attention to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s preface to Stanford’s The Tragedy (1897). The article analyzes how Rev. Stanford uses ancient rhetoric to argue for the sanctity of Black life, including both classical and biblical references, concluding with reflections upon pedagogical applications as well as the need for further study.

Sportula Europe, Mutual Aid, Solidarity, and Classics in Higher Education

Keywords: microgrant organisations, mutual aid, solidarity, Sportula Europe.

Abstract: This paper describes the efforts of the microgrant organisation, Sportula Europe, to offer material support as well as the kinship of solidarity to historically-looted and marginalised communities within Classics. Contextualising our work within critical intellectual traditions and the history of mutual aid practices, we reflect upon non-hierarchical approaches to ameliorate the material conditions of students and researchers in our field.

Res Diff 1.1 (2024) Complete Issue