THE NEWSLETTER OF THE CLASSICS DEPARTMENT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS www.classics.ku.edu • Issue 12 • Summer 2020 Dear Friends, This newsletter, a double issue for years 2018 and 2019, headed into press when the Covid-19 pandemic erupted. During this challenging time, we will strive to pursue an even deeper understanding of Classical culture and its complex legacy and to share that understanding with our students. Now more than ever Classics matters, when we must critically evaluate evidence, comprehend perspectives, and discern paths that honor self and other. This year’s Chair’s includes seminars on the authors high school Report is a joint effort, teachers need to know and in-class discussion since Tara and of teaching strategies and resources. We are Pam have shared lucky to have the opportunity every year the role of Chair at our Phillips Colloquium to share ideas over the past few about teaching Latin with an excellent cadre semesters while Tara was on research leave. of Latin teachers, many of whom were once Many thanks to Pam, who was willing to step fledgling Latinists in our programs. They back into that role after such a long run as now have much to teach us. Chair herself! Our curricular developments reflect We have been busy responding to the a movement in the discipline toward changing needs of our students and to interdisciplinary thinking, collaborative developments in Classics as a discipline. Our work, and outreach. In thinking beyond students are increasingly eager for thematic its traditional structures and practices, the approaches to the Greek and Roman past, discipline is becoming more inclusive and and our curriculum now includes exciting diverse – and not a moment too soon. A courses in Ancient Magic and Witches, rising area of scholarship focuses on our Gladiators in History and Film, Alexander field’s contributions to and acts of resistance the Great, Ancient Origins of Modern against racist and xenophobic ideologies. Dan-el Padilla Peralta during his lecture “Classics as a Form of Racial Knowing.” Politics, and Ancient STEM. We are also Our department is deliberate in teaching reprising Roman Literature and Civilization students and the broader community about modern perceptions of ancient sculpture. In with an embedded study abroad trip to this aspect of Classics, with the aim that they keeping with the Halloween theme, we hired Rome over Spring break. Meanwhile, understand ancient Greece and Rome not as a living statue – a street artist who held the long-standing favorites such as Greek and inert, distant, or closed cultures but rather as pose of the Apollo Belvedere (see photo). Roman Mythology and even Latin and part of our intellectual and cultural heritage Working with African and African Greek languages have undergone substantial that has substantial and complex bearing on American Studies, American Studies, the revision, with a critical thinking focus added our modern lives. In the past few years, we Graduate Association for Philosophy, and to the former and online components added have hosted numerous speakers or events the Hall Center for the Humanities, we to the latter. We continue to develop online that speak to these concerns. As part of the hosted Dan-el Padilla Peralta (Princeton versions of our courses, reaching students Hall Center’s first “Haunted Humanities” University) for a lecture on “Classics as a who might not otherwise turn to Classics. program, we presented “White Ghosts in the Form of Racial Knowing” (see photo). This For our graduate students, we are making Classical Museum,” a display, lecture, and event was structured around a question posed a conscious move toward offering more performance that raised issues related to the by Padilla Peralta: “How do disciplines such curricular support for those interested in colors of ancient sculpture and explored some as classics contribute to the organization and teaching Latin at the secondary level. This connections between racist ideologies and reproduction of those habits of mind and Facebook “f” Logo CMYK / .eps Facebook “f” Logo CMYK / .eps (continued on page 2) Join us on Facebook: University of Kansas Department of Classics Department News Chairs’ Report (continued from page 1) labor that sustain what Karen and Barbara Fields have termed ‘racecraft’?” We also hosted “A Cargo of Hellenic Beauty: Greek Picture Brides and American Whiteness,” a talk about early 20th-century Greek immigrants by Kathryn Vaggalis, PhD Candidate in American Studies at KU, and co-sponsored Donna Zuckerberg’s Keynote address for KU Masculinities Month, “Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age.” Donna Zuckerberg is the author of Not All Dead White Men (Harvard University Press, 2018), which explores online communities of the far right to better understand why and where antifeminism is thriving online. We invited our colleague Ben Jasnow from UMKC, to teach a course in race and ethnicity in antiquity, and later to lead a discussion on “teaching about ancient race and ethnicity” to our faculty and graduate students. We mentored two graduate students through theses dealing with modern political and cultural engagement with the classical world. Rachel Morrison explored how modern African American poets used and transformed the ancient poetry of Ovid, and Katri Niemi studied the use of Vergil’s Aeneid by Italian fascists in the 1930s; by the anti-war movement in the United States in the 1960s; and by the Alt-Right in the 2000s. More practically, through the efforts of Emma Scioli as Graduate Director, we have secured funding to help recruit minority students to our graduate program. In all these efforts we have relied on the energy and focus of our outstanding faculty. As you may know, three of your favorite professors have retired within the past five years: Tony Corbeill in 2017, Michael Shaw in 2018, and John Younger in 2019. Their legacy of impassioned teaching, intellectual depth, and service to the university is rich indeed. As you will see in the pages ahead, we have three new faculty members who have already made great contributions to the department and to KU. We are looking forward to more great things. With best wishes for the new year, Tara Welch and Pam Gordon Update from the Wilcox Classical Museum By Phil Stinson, Curator We are in the early stages of making much needed changes to our cherished Wilcox Classical Museum. Our goal is to utilize the museum much more than we are now, and to make the space and collection more inviting and more accessible to our target audience group and the broader KU community and public. The first major step of the project is to conduct organized planning activities during the next academic year. Our partners in this endeavor are the School of Architecture & Design, Museum Studies, and the Office of Campus Facilities, Planning and Development (FPD). In addition, we are midway in modernizing the museum’s professional operations and procedures. For instance, we are revising our core documents, most importantly the acquisition policy (under what circumstances and how we will collect artifacts in the future), which will be in line with recommendations from professional organizations such as the Archaeological Institute of America. We will also soon join the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries. In more news, a new online digital portal for the Wilcox Collection is nearly completed. Masterminded by graduate student Chad Uhl, the museum’s new website, now in beta form, features a searchable database driven by the content management system Omeka S. The database holds the collection’s catalogue entries for all inventoried artifacts and coins (originally prepared by former curators Elizabeth Banks, Paul Rehak, and John Younger). New digital photographs of each and every object and plaster cast are being taken by our undergraduate students. Once this fully illustrated database is completed, the development of a mobile app would also be within reach; the ultimate goal being to develop, through additional student-led initiatives, an app freely available to museum Undergraduate student Aaron Fugate photographing visitors and the public. objects from the Wilcox Collection. 2 www2.ku.edu/~classics Haunting Humanities 2018: “White Ghosts in the Classical Museum” By Pam Gordon and Phil Stinson f you were to be a Greek marble statue for Halloween—or a Greek or Roman god, hero, senator or empress—what color would you be? Would you gleam like the Parthenon or an extant bust of Pericles? If historical Iverisimilitude is the goal, “white” is a problematic answer. Despite the current appearance of ancient sculptures in today’s museums, and despite the implicit and sometimes explicit claims of some fascist and white supremacist groups, whiteness was not the norm in ancient Greek and Roman art, culture, or everyday life. Classicists are becoming increasingly aware that white marble was normally painted in darker colors, and that ancient Mediterranean peoples are unlikely to have looked like today’s white Europeans. These issues recently emerged as a burning topic for our department. At the first ever Haunting Humanities event on October 24th, 2018, held at Abe & Jake’s Landing in downtown Lawrence, a group of Classics students led by Profs. Phil Stinson and Emma Scioli presented research on historical and curatorial topics related to color and ancient art. They also demonstrated the department’s future plans to design a major new exhibit for the Wilcox Classical Museum devoted to the topic. A “living statue”—aka a street Living statue of Apollo Belvedere. Color study of the Wilcox artist who holds a pose as a statue, often fooling Collection’s plaster cast of bystanders—also appeared in the guise of the the bust of Roman emperor museum’s cast of the Apollo Belvedere. Marcus Aurelius (study by undergraduate student The living statue as well as a digital display on the methods that could be involved in “colorizing” our Aaron Fugate).