{"id":208,"date":"2025-01-09T19:14:11","date_gmt":"2025-01-09T19:14:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/?post_type=profile&p=208"},"modified":"2025-01-23T11:22:04","modified_gmt":"2025-01-23T16:22:04","slug":"nandini-pandey","status":"publish","type":"profile","link":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/profiles\/nandini-pandey\/","title":{"rendered":"Nandini Pandey"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

As a classicist, how you think that your research on Roman diversity intersect with the mission and themes of the Chloe Center?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Diversity is a divisive issue in America, socially and politically, as we\u2019ve seen with the 2023 Supreme Court decision on affirmative action. I\u2019ve often felt frustrated about having to do what Sara Ahmed calls the \u201clabor of diversity,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2018blood and soil\u2019 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\u2019s something the modern right wing doesn\u2019t see, and sometimes also the left.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019m especially excited to be cross-listed with the Chloe Center, because you\u2019re my tribe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The value of the interdisciplinary approach<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Chloe\u2019s interdisciplinary approaches to power and inequity, and migration and marginalization, interest me much more than my home discipline\u2019s traditional focus on texts written by elites\u2014texts later used to prop up white enslavers\u2019 conceptions of their cultural superiority. You don\u2019t need to know anything about Greece or Rome to take my courses. You just need to wonder: How and where did \u201crace\u201d originate? How did people in the past understand human difference? How did Classics, and many other fields, become part of the evolution of race?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I think of my FYS like a detective story. We read amazing works of literature, like the Odyssey\u2014 though Odysseus pushes himself up by inventing monsters to push down, so he\u2019s 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\u2019 built environment. Basically, I try to give students the tools to unpack the art, literature, culture, and architecture that surround us\u2014to help them view the world in multiple dimensions, including the fourth dimension of time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":259,"template":"","profiletype":[25],"class_list":["post-208","profile","type-profile","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","profiletype-faculty-and-staff"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/profile"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":231,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profile\/208\/revisions\/231"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"profiletype","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/profiletype?post=208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}