Classics Beyond Whiteness, with THM Gellar-Goad and Caitlin Hines

Abstract

What happens when, in the wake of worldwide upheaval, a Classics department decides to put into practice the principles of anti-racism and social justice in the classroom? Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is now the first department of Classics in the world to require coursework in critical race theory for all majors and minors. Shivaike Shah talks to the founding teachers, THM Gellar-Goad (Associate Professor at Wake Forest) and Caitlin Hines (Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati), about the impetus for the project, the impact it has had on the faculty, and the importance of destabilising assumptions about what ‘core’ Classics curricula should contain.

Bibliography

Open-source

Mary Beard, ‘Lord Elgin - Saviour or Vandal?’, BBC History (2015)

Rachel Herzog, ‘Reading Consent into The Iliad’, Eidolon

Stephanie McCarter and Jia Tolentino, ‘The Brutality of Ovid’, Lapham’s Quarterly (2019)

Dmitris Pandermalis, ‘Acropolis Museum Head Says Return of Parthenon Marbles the “Only Solution”’, Greek Travel Pages (2019)

Nancy Rabinowitz, ‘Teaching Tragedy to the Incarcerated’, Classics and Social Justice (2019)

Bridget Read, ‘The Liberating, Radical Politics of Hadestown’, Vogue (2019)

Paywalled

Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, The Island (1973)

Spike Lee, Chi-Raq (2015)

Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Pocket Books, 1995)

Transcript

You can find a full transcript of the episode here.