Two New Modules Consider the Ancient World beyond the Myth of Whiteness

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By now, many classicists have begun to recognise and to think about how the study of ancient Greece and Rome has contributed to promoting and upholding structures of white supremacy and other forms of racism. Part of the discipline of Classics’ role in supporting white supremacy has been in the elevation of ancient Greece and ancient Rome above other ancient societies, as something distinctly glorious and worthy of study. By lumping the diverse societies of the ancient Greek and Roman worlds together, a myth of a White, Western civilisation took shape, allowing those invested in such a myth to draw a straight line between, for example, fifth-century BCE Athens and the twentieth-century United States of America. Such narratives also serve to exclude societies constructed as non-White or non-European from the myth of civilisation. However, challenging such narratives remains controversial. A recent episode of ‘Horrible Histories’ was accused of reinventing history when it highlighted the fact that people with dark skin have been present in Britain since prehistory and that African soldiers in the Roman army were stationed in Britain. Such controversies serve to show that there remains an urgent need for a conversation on the assumed whiteness of the ancient world.

For several decades now, academics at the University of Reading’s Classics Department have been working to unpick this side of the discipline, thinking about how Classics has been used to promote ideologies of racism and colonialism, how those subject to racist and colonialist uses of the Classics have formulated their own responses to and resisted such uses, and how the legacies of ancient Greece and ancient Rome have been felt beyond the so-called West. Relatedly, Classicists at Reading have been turning to the idea of interconnected Global Antiquities, in order to decentre ancient Greece and Rome from perspectives on the ancient world. In 2023, two new undergraduate modules bring the research of staff in this area to the undergraduate syllabus, contributing an already diverse and boundary-pushing offering of modules.

In the Spring Term of 2023, Dr Sam Agbamu introduced a third-year module on ‘Race and Ethnicity in the Ancient Greek and Roman Worlds’. Taking students from the earliest texts of the Greco-Roman literary canon right up to contemporary Classical Reception, the module focuses on how ideas of race and ethnicity took root in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds and how such ideas continue to shape the worlds we live in today. One of the aims of the module is to challenge the biological reality of race, by showing just how changeable conceptions of race in the ancient world were. As well as looking at how race was thought about in antiquity, students also study how authors, artists, and scholars racialised as ‘non-white’ have encountered the constructed whiteness of classical antiquity. The module encourages students to draw on their own experiences and perceptions of race and ethnicity in order to formulate personal responses to the texts and material studied. Part of this involves creative elements of coursework, in which students can respond to module material in a medium of their choosing, whether that be a piece of visual art, creative writing, or a film. The module is running again in the 2023/2024 academic year, and will be updated to take into account the rapidly developing scholarship in the field, as well as the changing global context in which the module situates itself.

In Spring 2024 Professor Rachel Mairs will be teaching a new second-year module on Ancient Ethiopia: The Aksumite Kingdom.  This module looks at the city of Aksum, in modern Ethiopia, and its empire in the third and fourth centuries CE.  Spectacular monuments remain at Aksum today: tall stelae used to mark the graves of kings, stone inscriptions, the ruins of palaces.  All of these speak to the Aksumite kingdom’s sense of its own power and place in the world.  Aksum is mentioned in a small number of ancient Greek and Roman historical sources, but this module takes a different angle by focussing on Aksumite accounts of their own history: whether inscriptions from the period of the empire itself, or later Ethiopian and Eritrean written and oral histories which give the memory of Aksum a special place in local identities in the northern Horn of Africa.

 

Written by Sam Agbamu and Rachel Mairs

Prof. Eleanor Dickey speaks to pupils at Garth Hill College

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We were thrilled to see the opening session of this years’ Garth Hill College Military History Society being led by University of Reading’s Professor Eleanor Dickey. 

The session was designed specifically for the society, and saw pupils learning how people living in Vindolanda, near Hadrian’s wall, wrote letters to each other. Pupils were able to use replica tools to write out their own letter, which they could then take home.

It was great to hear how much the students enjoyed the session, and we thank Garth Hill College and of course Professor Dickey for hosting.

You can read the full bulletin from Garth Hill College here.

 

Launch of a new Ure Museum exhibition

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We are delighted to announce a new exhibition— Locus Ludi: Anyone can play!—on display at the Ure Museum from 6 September until 30 November, 2023. Image of ancient game pieces from the Ure Museum
This new exhibition, inspired by the European Research Council funded project Locus Ludi: The Cultural Fabric of Play and Games in Classical Antiquity, led by Professor Véronique Dasen, is an opportunity to explore the rich collections relating to games and play in antiquity that are available not only at the Ure Museum but at other UK museums. The exhibition is co-curated by Jayne Holly (Ure Assistant Curator) and Summer Courts (one of our PhD candidates) and benefits particularly from Summer’s expertise in ancient games. We are most grateful to Colchester and Ipswich Museums, Reading Museum, The British Museum and the University of Reading’s Special Collections for the loan of important artefacts from their collections. Han

Another highlight is the game pieces and other contents of the Stanway Doctor’s Grave, a first-century AD tomb discovered by archaeologists in Stanway, Essex, in 1996. (NB you may have heard that ‘Doctor’ referred also as  ‘The Druid of Colchester’, for indeed it is unclear whether he was Celtic, Roman, or other, Druid or even doctor. Nontheless he was buried with a unique gameboard that still baffles experts. You can learn more about it with this video made by the Panoply Vase Animation Project (created with support from the University of Reading’s Friends and Arts Committee) and of course by visiting the exhibition in the Ure Museum!

We have planned several exciting activities and outreach events to coincide with this exhibition. All are welcome but please note that bookings are required for the first two events:

 

Tragedy Queered: A conference to explore the impact of Graeco-Roman tragedy on queer culture (6-7 July 2023)

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Greek and Roman tragedy has served as a platform to explore and discuss central issues regarding politics, identities, and societal issues, ranging from feminism, race, fascism, and communism to abortion, generational tensions, and national identity. LGBTQI+ issues of identities, desires and politics have also found a useful tool in ancient tragedy as a channel for exploration, discussion, and vindication. Tragedy has been queer, queered, and queering for many a decade now.

The international and interdisciplinary conference Tragedy Queered, which took place at the University of Reading on the 6th and 7th of July 2023, precisely explored the dialogue, relationships and cross-fertilisations between Graeco-Roman tragedy and queer culture. The conference developed substantial and consistent insights into a phenomenon that has remained almost untouched in scholarship. All fifteen speakers, from provenances as diverse as L’Aquila, London, Santa Barbara, Philadelphia, Oxford, and New York, and ranging in academic positions from postgraduate students to full professors, explored and analysed the use of ancient tragedy in queer culture in a vast array of media, including novels, drag, theatrical stagings, poetry, dance, film, multi-media performance, and biography. The papers, headed by the keynote speech on Judith Butler, Freud, and the house of Oedipus by Professor Orrells (KCL), exhibited a diverse plethora of queer-tragic receptions and dialogues. Among other issues, they explored the importance of the tragic character and plots of Helen and Philoctetes regarding the loss and struggles of AIDS in novels and drag, queer love and loss in dance and multimedia performance, how Athena is a good or bad example for trans experience, the tragic in pre-Stonewall poetic writing and the translation, tragic structures, plots and characters in film and theatre, and what can queer theory bring to ancient tragic texts and performances.

The conference and its speakers managed to do far more than I expected as organiser. It was able to establish points of departure for many aspects in the study of the relationship between tragedy and queer culture and also of the tragic and the queer; it was able to pay attention to queer culture before and after the Stonewall Riots, the historiographical starting-point for queer liberation; it was able to attest to queer lives, queer history and queer theory and the interweaved presence of tragedy in them; and finally, and perhaps most importantly, it was able to further consolidate and multiply a community of queer scholars, students, artists and people, past, present, and future. Keep your eyes peeled for the volume that will result from the conference, so you can see with you own eyes what Tragedy Queered was able to reveal, explore and unite on two summery tragic-queer days in Reading.

Special thanks to the Tragedy Queered sponsors: Institute of Classical Studies (SAS, UoL); The Department of Classics (UoR); Dean for Diversity and Inclusion (UoR); Research Dean for Heritage & Creativity (UoR). I am very grateful to Matthew Knight for his excellent and indispensable work in designing the poster, programme, and name tags and to Josh Ison for his essential help in guaranteeing that the conference ran smoothly and enjoyably. Thanks also to colleagues in the department for their support and encouragement.

 

Written by Dr. Oliver Baldwin

The Reading Ancient Schoolroom at Butser Ancient Farm’s Roman Villa

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Butser Ancient Farm has invited the Reading Ancient Schoolroom to offer a Romano-British rendition of the Reading Ancient Schoolroom from the 1st to the 7th of August.

Run by Professor Eleanor Dickey and Research Associate Nadin Marsovszki, the Reading Ancient Schoolroom enables modern students to discover first-hand what the ancient world was really like, by attending a re-created ancient school. The Reading Ancient Schoolroom takes place in a replica of an ancient school, in which all participants wear Roman costumes and use replica ancient writing materials. Students practise the type of exercises that were commonly done in ancient schools and do so in a setting that uses the ancient rather than modern educational convention.

Notably, this marks the first occasion in which the Ancient Schoolroom will transport participants to Roman Britain, as its previous iterations were centred on ancient Egypt. As a result, adjustments have been made, such as transitioning from papyri to wooden tablets and adapting exercises accordingly. For instance, the reading exercise now revolves around Vergil’s Aeneid, instead of Homer’s Iliad. Moreover, several novel activities have been introduced, including a Vindolanda alphabet writing task, a Roman acting class, and progymnasmata  exercises.

Butser Ancient Farm is an open-air experimental archaeology museum and active research center, encompassing various historical periods from the Stone Age to the Saxons. Among its attractions are a Stone Age farm, a Bronze Age roundhouse, a Celtic village, a Roman villa, and Saxon halls. This unique setting is ideally suited to enhance the immersive learning experience we aim to provide.

For further details about Butser Ancient Farm, please visit www.butserancientfarm.co.uk. Additionally, we encourage you to explore our revamped website, where you can find more information about the Reading Ancient Schoolroom, at www.readingancientschoolroom.com.

We hope to see you at Butser!

Prof. Ian Rutherford elected Fellow of the British Academy

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Prof. Ian RutherfordThe British Academy, the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, today announces the election of Ian Rutherford, our Professor of Classics at Reading, as a Fellow of the British Academy. He is one of 52 new UK Fellows who together exemplify a breadth of SHAPE (Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts for People and the Economy) disciplines. This prestigious accolade is due recognition of Ian’s prolific research in ancient Greek poetry,  ancient religion, especially pilgrimage, and  contact between early Greece and other cultures, particularly ancient Anatolia (Türkiye) and Egypt. He has published four monographs, nine (co-)edited volumes, and over 100 articles. A strong believer in the benefits of research-led teaching, Ian regularly teaches these subjects to our Department’s UG and PG cohorts.

Professor Ian Rutherford’s election gives Reading Classics two Fellows of the British Academy (FBA), the other being Professor Eleanor Dickey, making it the only Classics department outside Oxford and Cambridge to have more than one Fellow in post. While Reading’s Classics Department is relatively small—e.g. the smallest Classics unit submitted to the most recent REF—the presence of two FBAs in post is a strong indication of its research excellence and international recognition. The British Academy elects only one or two scholars per subject per year, after a rigorous evaluation from internationally recognised scholars in each discipline.

Congratulations to Ian for this well deserved recognition of his outstanding contributions to scholarship.

Classics and Italian Colonialism: A Three-Day Conference at the Museo delle Civiltà, Rome (22-24 June 2023)

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Written by Samuel Agbamu

Rome is a city steeped in the history of empire. Few tourists will fail to visit any number of the imposing remains of the Rome of the Caesars, be it the Colosseum, Pantheon, or the Forum. Yet the imperial history of Rome did not end with the putative fall of the Western Roman Empire, whenever we might date that, nor with Charles V’s sack of Rome in 1527, nor even with the incorporation of Rome into the Kingdom of Italy in 1870. Of the major European imperial powers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Italy stands out as perhaps the least discussed, either inside or outside Italy, and one of the least understood. Because of its easy association with the Fascist regime, which held power from 1922 to 1943, and the invasion of Ethiopia launched by Mussolini in 1935, the legacy of modern Italian imperialism is frequently subsumed into the question of Fascism. Yet Italy pursued an imperial agenda almost at the same time as being unified as a nation in the 1860s, and the legacies of its colonial endeavours persisted long after the death of Mussolini, and continue to be felt in many ways today. Furthermore, Fascism is well known for adopting, adapting, and inventing ideas drawn from ancient Rome, from the so-called ‘Roman salute’ to the symbol of the Fasces itself. Yet modern Italian imperialism, prior to Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922, had a long history of posing itself as ancient Rome’s successor, returning to regions that had once been part of the Roman empire.

It was with such considerations in mind that Elena Giusti (University of Warwick) and I organised a three-day conference in Rome in June 2023. When we began to put the event together, we did not know that we would be having these discussions in a country run by Georgia Meloni’s Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party. Fratelli d’Italia are the heir to Mussolini’s Fascist party, and were swept into power partly on the basis of virulent anti-migration policies. Many of the migrants who are targeted by Meloni’s xenophobic rhetoric and policies depart for Italy from the coast of North Africa, especially Libya, a former colony of Italy. Similarly, many of the migrants originate from Italy’s former east African colonies. Italy’s right-wing, anti-immigration governments have been especially vociferous in their hostility towards those crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa to Europe’s southern shores, despite the fact that Italian imperial ideology once promoted the notion that the North African coastline was Italy’s ‘Fourth Shore’, and that Libya was, in fact, a part of Italy. Such ongoing ramifications of Italy’s past imperial claims, many of which were based on selective readings of North African ancient history, made the urgency of this conference acutely felt.

Rome’s EUR district was built for the Esposizione Universale Roma 1942, which never took place due to the outbreak of the Second World War. At the end of the road is the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana or the so-called ‘Square Colosseum’. Photo by author.

The conference was hosted at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome, in collaboration with Rosa Anna di Lella and Gaia Delpino, cultural anthropologists working at the museum. Set within the imposing EUR district of Rome, the ultimate architectonic expression of Fascism’s self-representation, the museum holds the collections of the former Museo Coloniale, inaugurated by Mussolini in 1923. Recently, the museum has been working to contextualise and expose the hidden histories of its collections, culminating with the current exhibition, Museo delle Opacità. In this context, to host the conference in the heart of an area built in Fascism’s image, but in an institution working hard to address the legacies of colonialism and Fascism from within, offered a particular poignancy to the event’s proceedings.

Over the three days of the conference, we heard from not only classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists, but also scholars of Italian history and literature, as well as North African and East African history. Papers addressed such themes as Italian archaeologists’ promotion of colonialism in the Aegean and North Africa, the legacies of intellectuals who had used ancient history to support or resist imperial ideologies, ancient history in the Fascist Italian classroom, and new methodological and theoretical perspectives on Italian imperial history. The final day involved workshops organised by the museum on their colonial collections, while the conference was closed by Angelica Pesarini with a keynote on teaching Italian colonialism in the university classroom.

The conference confirmed that the relationship between Classics and colonialism in Italian contexts remains an important and still underdeveloped field of research. This remains the case despite a recent profusion of publications, including forthcoming monographs from Sergio Brillante and myself.  There especially remains much work to be done on this topic from an avowedly anti-/decolonial perspective . Elena Giusti and I plan to publish an edited volume with De Gruyter including contributions from the conference.

More information about the conference, including the full programme and paper abstracts can be found here.

We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Institute of Classical Studies, the Past and Present Society, the University of Warwick Connecting Cultures funding scheme, and the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

New book: A Citizen of Nowhere

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We are delighted to announce that Dr Hana Navratilova’s new book A Citizen of Nowhere, a biography of Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý, has recently been published. We spoke to Hana about her research and her thoughts on this latest publication.

Hana is both an Egyptologist and an historian. Both groups work along similar principles to forensic specialists, with only traces of past lives to provide insight. However, unlike the forensic teams, there are often traces modern scholars don’t know how to read yet. Experiencing places and landscapes provides valuable insight, however there are also reams of letters and documents to read. From governmental archives to private letters, from photographic record of artefacts to snapshots from a windy day on an excavation, there is much to disentangle.

As an Egyptologist, Hana works with ancient texts and artefacts from Egypt, to look more closely at ancient lives and how communities lived. Currently, she is working on a project that has a working title ‘biography of a pyramid’, which is concerned with monumental buildings and how the ancient Egyptians perceived and used them. But it asks other questions too – how does a building become a monument, and how may it die, and be revived again? From working sites to the sites of burial, worship and memory, to the sites of identity, to being material resources, to a transformation into heritage, the pyramids’ life runs a full circle illustrating humanity’s changing relationship with our history. There is a responsibility when talking and writing about past lives, and determining whose voice should be heard, and we owe it to the past to be open-minded and let it speak with its own voices: it may help to understand our present.

As an historian, Hana is not concerned only with the ancient world, but also in how we study it. Life-writing is well suited to the task of critical, but open-minded historiography, and Hana uses it in her own history teaching. Through life-writing one is faced with people and things as individuals and must ask demanding and uncomfortable questions. It is important to see events and other people from several different angles, which can bring us out of our comfort zone. Above all we must ask, what does ancient Egypt, its people, and its artefacts, mean for the modern world? Answering this requires a reading and re-reading of history, to reflect on how we use the past in our own lives and how we develop and replicate our research. Lives of researchers are relevant here, and this is where A Citizen of Nowhere comes in.

The new publication is a biography and chronological narrative of the Egyptologist Jaroslav Černý, who, like Hana, was an immigrant in the UK. The book was named A Citizen of Nowhere following Hana’s view that transnational lives have their place in our world and their stories are worth telling.

Congratulations to Dr Hana Navratilova on her exciting work. You can find A Citizen of Nowhere on the Peeters Publishers website.

Those wishing to explore Egyptology resources and records further can also visit the Griffith Institute Archive website.

In the shadow of Hippolytos: Classical studies in honour of Professor Barbara E. Goff

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Woman sacrificing on cup in Toledo Museum of ArtTo celebrate the work of our esteemed friend, colleague and Co-head of Department, Prof. Barbara Goff, we have planned a one-day conference in her honour, on the cusp of her retirement, Friday 22nd September 2023. We have assembled an international cadre of her colleagues, collaborators, (former) students and other associates to discuss the diverse range of inclusive and innovative Classical studies on which she herself has contributed so greatly to scholarship in our and related academic fields. The conference’s four themes, which engage with aspects of her teaching and scholarship are the following:

  • Drama, Theory, History
  • A Sporting Life
  • Broad(er) Classics
  • Re-roo/uting Classics

We are delighted to announce that we will be joined also by Dr Stella Keramida from University of Reading’s Department of Film, Theatre, and Television, who with her students is preparing a performance of (some of) Trojan Women. 

Everyone is invited to join us — whether in person or online — to celebrate Prof. Goff on this august occasion, but please sign up here. Please do not hesitate to contact doukissa.kamini@reading.ac.uk for further details or if you have any questions.

Amy Smith, Dania Kamini and Oliver Baldwin

The full programme is linked here.

Developments in Ancient Language Pedagogy

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The following blog has been written by Jackie Baines, who organised a workshop on ‘Developments in Ancient Language Pedagogy’ held in the Department on Friday 19th May 2023. We would like to thank Jackie and all those involved for running such a successful event!

Steven Hunt – Edward Ross – Maiken Mosleth King – James Robson – Jackie Baines

On the 19th May I ran an international blended workshop on the topic of advances in ancient language pedagogy. The workshop came about as part of my research leave which, as a teaching intensive lecturer, has given me the opportunity to look at ways in which I might refresh my pedagogical ideas and practices. I am indebted to Edward Ross who assisted me with many aspects of the organisation of this event. The rationale for the workshop and the choice of talks and speakers came about as a result of experiences and observations over a number of years teaching Latin here at the University of Reading, which include the following:

Choice of Textbooks

For many years we used Jones and Sidwell Reading Latin as the main textbook with all its quirks and difficulties for complete beginners.  After looking at the suitability of many possible alternatives we subsequently moved to using Taylor’s Latin to GCSE which is very much more approachable in its presentation of grammar and its layout for 21st century students but has many drawbacks for moving on with speed and full understanding, to higher levels of Latin. 

Teaching Spoken Latin

This academic year (2022 – 2023) I am grateful to my colleague Professor Eleanor Dickey who organised weekly sessions of spoken Latin for colleagues, run by teachers from Oxford Latinitas. It was a revelation in a number of ways, principally, that there are definite advantages to learning to use a language, now considered ‘dead’ by many, as languages are normally used – that is to speak.  Latin was indeed taught orally until relatively recently, so why aren’t we doing more of it?  A subsidiary lesson for me was being returned to the position of student, at times most alarming and stressful when using a language I know well, but in a totally unfamiliar way.  I have set up a student focus group using Ørberg’s Lingua Latina per se Illustrata. I am impressed by the speed of vocabulary acquisition and grammatical understanding gained by reading and speaking using only (mostly!) Latin.

Online learning in the post-pandemic world

The pandemic has made us realise the possibilities of online tools for additional learning support.  The rise of AI, in particular Chat GPT is opening up a myriad of opportunities and unnerving problems, both for teachers and for the students themselves who need to have enough understanding to use such tools appropriately. Edward A.S. Ross has recently published an article discussing this further here. Edward and I are delighted to be able to announce that since the workshop we have been awarded Teaching and Learning Enhancement Projects funding by the University of Reading to investigate and trial ChatGPT as a conversational language study tool by codifying and standardising methods for using conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) models in ancient language classes.

Workshop talks

In the workshop we were treated to six stimulating and thought-provoking talks, listed below with abstracts available here. Speakers reflected on past practices and perceptions of ancient languages and how they have been taught along with learning how the emergence of new technologies and their use can be used to enhance our teaching. Thanks to all speakers for their contributions.

Emergent pedagogies in classical languages teaching in UK schools: Steven Hunt (University of Cambridge)

Capturing the Classroom: A Snapshot of Approaches to Latin Teaching in UK Universities: Mair E. Lloyd (Open University and University of Cambridge); James Robson (Open University)

Using Simple Grammar Videos to Flip the Classroom: Antonia Ruppel (Institute of Indology and Tibetology, LMU Munich)

Digital software as a pedagogical aid in teaching ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs: Maiken Mosleth King (University of Bristol)

A New Frontier: AI and Ancient Language Pedagogy: Edward A. S. Ross (University of Reading)

Living Latin in the Classroom: benefits and challenges of communicative approaches: Mair E. Lloyd (Open University and University of Cambridge)

 

Written by Jackie Baines