Departments
Events sponsored by the Brooklyn College Department of Classics address the relevance of the discipline for our times.
Classics
The author Margalit Fox comments in a piece she wrote for The New York Times in 2013 that as "an obituary writer at the Times, I have the great, improbable pleasure of reconstituting the lives of interesting people. And few people, it turns out, are as interesting as the influential obscure." Fox uses her article to encapsulate and celebrate the life and work of a former Brooklyn College professor of Classics, Alice E. Kober. Kober was also the subject of Fox's book, The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code.
Fox's description of the scholar she credits with being responsible for uncovering the meaning of the ancient Mycenaean Greek script known as Linear B as one of the "influential obscure" might very well be used to describe the field of classical studies itself. It is true that the numbers of those drawn to the classics major may be small (for every one classics major at Brooklyn College, for example, there may be 100 majors in some other popular departments). And small numbers can often be obscured in a larger picture. Nonetheless, the field of classics is remarkable for how successful, and therefore, influential, its graduates are in shaping the larger world. According the Association of American Medical Colleges, as reported in the Princeton Review, "students who major or double-major in classics have a better success rate getting into medical school than do students who concentrate solely in biology, microbiology, and other branches of science." It may be that the doctor who one day shepherds you to a ripe old age swore to the Hippocratic Oath in the original ancient Greek!
The Brooklyn College Department of Classics encourages prospective students and others to consider the major, as an opportunity "to hone your own ability to discern, design, persuade, instruct, and judge in areas as diverse as medicine, law, teaching, business, religious studies, and every profession where communication skills and critical engagement with text are crucial." Majors are given the option of concentrating in language study (either Latin or Ancient Greek) or in Greek and Roman culture. Despite a long history as part of the academic canon, classics at Brooklyn College has evolved. Recently added courses, including CLAS 3245 (Comparative Identity Politics) and CLAS 3035 (Conversing with Antiquity) "specifically address how the ancient world continues to inform attitudes about issues that concern modern society, including race, class, and gender," according to Professor Danielle Kellogg, department chair.
Although large numbers of students may not choose the classics major, each semester the Classics Department teaches over 1,000 students as part of the general education curriculum at Brooklyn College. As Kellogg notes, "the diverse, interdisciplinary nature of classics makes it a perfect element in a liberal arts and sciences education, and the rigorous nature of the curriculum prepares students for a variety of future challenges."
Classics offers a unique opportunity to learn two years of Latin or Greek in one summer through its world-renowned Latin/Greek Institute, under the directorship of Katherine Lu Hsu. Since 2016 the institute has been able to offer Stavros Niarchos Foundation Scholarships, funded by a $1 million grant from the Stavros Niarchos Foundation to enable students with financial need to attend and contributes to increasing diversity in the fields of the humanities.
In addition to filling their teaching responsibilities, faculty in the Department of Classics are active scholars. Of special note:
- Brian Sowers has published "The Socratic Black Panther: Reading Huey P. Newton Reading Plato" in the Journal of African American Studies. He is co-editing (with classics professors David Schur and Katherine Lu Hsu) a volume of proceedings from The Body Unbound, a conference which took place at Brooklyn College in 2016. He was the recipient of the Feliks Gross Award from the CUNY Academy, a CUNY Mellon Faculty Diversity Career Enhancement Initiative Fellow, and Tow Travel Awards in both 2017 and 2018. Additionally, Sowers has co-authored with Kimberly Passaro, a Brooklyn College alumna, a forthcoming piece, "Christianity Re-sexualized: Intertextuality and the Early Christian Novel." The book chapter will appear in Exploring Gender Diversity in the Ancient World, edited by Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer. Passaro, incidentally, is attending the Ph.D. program in classics at the University of Cincinnati on full fellowship.
- Katherine Lu Hsu, in addition to co-editing The Body Unbound with Schur and Sowers, was recently awarded a Career Enhancement Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation/Mellon Foundation.
- Danielle L. Kellogg is currently working on a monograph about migration and democratic policy in ancient Athens. She has been invited to present this research at a colloquium on Greek Epichoric Histories at Oxford University in the spring.
- Phillip Thibodeau recently published in the Journal of Hellenic Studies an article describing his discovery of ancient plans for a lunar-solar calculator—the oldest such plans of which we know, drawn up by the Greek astronomer Anaximander. He is also about to initiate publication of open-access digital monograph on the Near Eastern origins of ancient Greek science.
The Department of Classics looks forward this spring to the 42nd Annual Costas Memorial Lecture on May 8, 2018, with Professor Walter Scheidel. Scheidel is Dickason Professor in the Humanities, Professor of Classics and History, and Catherine R. Kennedy and Daniel L. Grossman Fellow in Human Biology at Stanford University. His most recent book, The Great Leveler, has been reviewed in The New York Times, the Guardian, the London Financial Times, and numerous other places.
There is always something to look forward to in the Department of Classics, the department perhaps best known for how it looks back at a former time and place. As Associate Professor Liv Yarrow, writes in her blog, "A discipline only has a place in the modern academy if it can articulate its contemporary relevance. The onus is on each scholar to build these connections, beyond platitudes of history repeating itself." Faculty in the department do just that for every student who passes through their classrooms.
Back to Critical Thinking – February 2018
