Classics and Students of Colour, with Andi Burton Marsh

Abstract

Is Classics outreach working? Does it address the concerns of students once they’re at university? In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks with Andi Burton Marsh, recent University of Oxford graduate, about her experiences studying Classics as a state-educated Black woman. Andi was heavily involved in access and outreach initiatives as an undergraduate, and now works in widening the participation of disproportionately underrepresented students in top UK universities. Shivaike and Andi discuss Andi’s founding of the Christian Cole Society, which aims to build a community of Classics students of colour and amplify the voices and histories of BIPOC people from the ancient world, as well as people from the global majority within academia. Andi talks about how crucial curriculum reform is for outreach, and shares her experience of working to decolonise Oxford Classics.

Bibliography

open-source

Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: New York University Press, 2000)

Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993)

Shelley P. Hayley, ‘Black Feminist Thought and Classics: Re-membering, Re-claiming, Re-empowering’, in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz & Amy Richlin, Feminist Theory and the Classics (London: Routledge, 1993)

Patrice D. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

paywalled

Barbara Goff (ed.), Classics and Colonialism (London: Duckworth, 2005)

Lorna Hardwick & Carol Gillespie (ed.), Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (London: Penguin Classics, 2019)

Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992)

Cheryl A. Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), introduction

Tracey Lorraine Walters, African American Literature and the Classicist Tradition: Black Women Writers from Wheatley to Morrison (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) 

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.