Position: Associate Professor, Department of Classics

Chloe affilliation: Faculty Board Member

As a classicist, how you think that your research on Roman diversity intersect with the mission and themes of the Chloe Center?

Diversity is a divisive issue in America, socially and politically, as we’ve seen with the 2023 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. I’ve often felt frustrated about having to do what Sara Ahmed calls the “labor of diversity,” like sit on pointless committees and absorb white guilt or resentment. I also hate when white supremacists, like the January 2020 insurrectionists, appropriate and misrepresent classical antiquity.

The Roman empire was exploitative and highly unequal, for sure: it colonized and enslaved people and trafficked them as commodities into urban centers. But it also enfranchised some, within limits, and it never had a ‘blood and soil’ mentality. The Romans loved their diversity, albeit egotistically, and recognized that they flourished and gained practical advantage by incorporating different people. They knew you need to get people on board by actually enfranchising them and sharing some power. That’s something the modern right wing doesn’t see, and sometimes also the left.

This is why I teach my First-Year Seminar (FYS) “Race Before Race: Difference and Diversity in the Ancient Mediterranean”: to make students more informed consumers of contemporary pop culture, media, and politics, but also better leaders of science and policy. I’m especially excited to be cross-listed with the Chloe Center, because you’re my tribe.

The value of the interdisciplinary approach

Chloe’s interdisciplinary approaches to power and inequity, and migration and marginalization, interest me much more than my home discipline’s traditional focus on texts written by elites—texts later used to prop up white enslavers’ conceptions of their cultural superiority. You don’t need to know anything about Greece or Rome to take my courses. You just need to wonder: How and where did “race” originate? How did people in the past understand human difference? How did Classics, and many other fields, become part of the evolution of race?

I think of my FYS like a detective story. We read amazing works of literature, like the Odyssey— though Odysseus pushes himself up by inventing monsters to push down, so he’s a prime example of racecraft. We learn how to interpret art. We do field trips to engage with our larger Baltimore community. My favorite of these is the Homewood Museum right on our doorstep, since it shows how race lives all around us, even in our campus’ built environment. Basically, I try to give students the tools to unpack the art, literature, culture, and architecture that surround us—to help them view the world in multiple dimensions, including the fourth dimension of time.