Event Videos: Radical Re-Imaginings: Classics for the 21st Century — a Symposium
On Friday, September 5, and Saturday, September 6, BISR hosted Radical Re-Imaginings: Classics for the 21st Century, a two-day symposium made possible by grants from the Society for Classical Studies and the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes. An interdisciplinary group of scholars from within and beyond academia convened for a lively, contentious, and generative conversation about the present and future of Classics, and how to reckon with the discipline’s historical complicity with epistemic, political, and material violence. How, they asked, might reframing, retheorizing, and repoliticizing the classics better help us navigate our present political crises?
In Friday’s opening panel, Forget the Classics?, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Mathura Umachandran, Del A. Maticic, Erin Petrella, Hannah Silverblank, and Bruce King asked whether Classics can be redeemed, and, if not, what it would mean to jettison the discipline as it is currently understood and practiced.
The symposium continued Saturday morning with a panel on The Politics of Translation, featuring Emily Wilson, Lynn Kozak, James Redfield, and Lauren K. Wolfe in conversation about what it means to continuously retranslate antiquity.
During our third panel, The Question of Comparison, Kiran Pizarro Mansukhani, Mathura Umachandran, Kate Meng Brassel, Nancy Worman, and Laura Slatkin considered what constitutes a useful comparison, and asked what might be gained from taking incomparability as a starting point.
And the symposium closed with a conversation on Doing Classics in Dark Times. Brooke Holmes, Marchella Ward, Donna Zuckerberg, Curtis Dozier, and Bruce King explored how we might repoliticize our scholarship and pedagogy to resist the cynical leveraging of antiquity towards reactionary ends.
Complete videos of each panel comprising the symposium are available below. A detailed schedule of sessions, as well as biographies of symposium participants, can be accessed here.
Panel One | Forget the Classics?
Panel Two | The Politics of Translation
Panel Three | The Question of Comparison
Panel Four | Doing Classics in Dark Times