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Author Archives: katherinemcdonald


WCC Steering Committee Elections 2019

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Elections are now open for two positions on the Steering Committee of the WCC UK for April 2019 to April 2023. The Steering Committee runs the WCC UK, including organizing events, workshops, and overseeing future development of the WCC UK. Committee members serve for four years, and may stand for a second consecutive term. Three members of the WCC UK have been nominated to stand for election to the Steering Committee. A short CV and statement have been provided by each candidate for review by members of the WCC UK prior to voting.

Voting opens on 25th February and will run until 22nd March 2019. The elected members will be announced in late March, and will assume office at the AGM in April of 2019. If you are a member of the WCC UK in good standing, you will receive an email with a link for voting online. If you do not receive an email or have any questions, please contact the Elections Officer, Thea Lawrence (Thea dot Lawrence at nottingham dot ac dot uk).

Candidates

Gregory Gilles (Read CV and statement)

Elizabeth Lewis (Read and statement)

April Pudsey (Read CV) (Read statement)

 

Joint statement following racist incidents at the AIA/SCS

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Please see below for a joint statement from three UK Classics organisations. The WCC-UK intends to issue its own independent statement as well, which will include an invitation for further discussion at a town hall meeting during our AGM in Cardiff on 10th May 2019 – mark your diaries!
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As representatives of the UK Classics community, we deplore the incidents of overt racism that took place at the AIA/SCS conference in San Diego. The incidents were widely reported in the media and online; readers can consult this Chronicle of Higher Education article for details along with links to the responses of some of those most directly targeted. We also deplore the racism that continues within our field, implicit and explicit, every day; it is our responsibility as Classicists to challenge our discipline’s racist history and the structural inequalities that persist today within Classics and academia more broadly. None of these problems are confined by national borders, and the UK community, including our organisations, has a long way to go in reckoning with their manifestations in our own country. The Royal Historical Society’s recent report on Race, Ethnicity, and Equality suggests one set of models for progress.
Although blatant manifestations of racism like those seen in San Diego are only the tip of the iceberg, and there is much more to be done, we would like to draw all colleagues’ attention to the Code of Conduct that will be in effect at FIEC/CA this summer in London.
Council of University Classics Departments
Greg Woolf, Director of the Institute of Classical Studies
The Steering Committee of the Women’s Classical Committee UK

Political Georgics

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Guest post by Charlie Kerrigan.

In this short note ­– an edited version of my spotlight presentation to the WCC 2018 AGM – I’m concerned with the possibility of a politically-engaged approach to the teaching of Latin literature. My thanks to the organisers for an excellent meeting.

The entire discourse surrounding Virgil’s Georgics is influenced by the contexts of its reception, not least the way in which structures of race, gender, and class have limited, over time, access to classical education. There are women whose comments on the Georgics can be recovered in Britain in the period 1800–1930, but they are a minority. Scholarly discourse on the poem is exclusively male, and written mostly by male graduates of Oxford and Cambridge. That discourse is problematic, firstly because it is unrepresentative, and secondly because it obfuscates any sense of conflict – agrarian, political, imperial – in the poem, in favour of depoliticized, highly-aesthetic appreciation. The problem is not Victorian scholars’ championing of the poem’s ‘artistic perfection’ (the phrase is T. E. Page’s, from the preface to his 1898 commentary), but rather the way in which more political contexts were lost amidst the praise. Social contexts influence, in a very real way, what any poem is taken to be, and the depoliticization of the Georgics has had lasting influence in scholarship.

The Georgics describes in its lines a number of peoples and places that were subject to Roman imperialism. Such portrayals can be read as the kind of cultural imperialism with which postcolonial scholars take issue. One example is the cotton groves of the Ethiopians, ‘white with soft wool’ [Virgil, Georgics, 2.120]. While ‘Ethiopia’ is an inexact and very literary toponym in classical literature, it should be remembered that a few years after the Georgics first appeared, a Roman commander is said to have suppressed an Ethiopian revolt, attacked Napata, the royal residence, and sent one thousand prisoners back to Octavian in Rome [see Strabo 17.1.54 (820–1 C), Res Gestae 26.5, Dio Cassius 54.5.4–6]. Literary representation is not unrelated to imperial power, and this is something which informs not just the Georgics itself, but aspects of its later reception.

In 1844, a member of an expedition from British India to Abyssinia published a report on the area around what is now the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa. He was Captain Douglas Graham, Principal Assistant to the expedition’s leader, Major William Cornwallis Harris (1807–48). What Graham finds are a primitive people, who burn their fields, and keep bees, just like the farmers of the Georgics. Passages from the poem, in Latin, are quoted directly in his report. The Georgics is used here to portray a people in primitive and prelapsarian terms. More nefarious, however, is how, in Graham’s eyes, this perceived primitiveness makes the people he describes prime candidates for the benefits of European ‘civilisation’, which is to say imperial intervention. And while Abyssinia suffered the worst excesses of European imperialism only in the twentieth century, a British force did invade the country in 1868, and the cultural treasures it stole still reside in British institutions.

In the context of contemporary classical pedagogy, what strikes me is how politically educative a text like the Georgics and its broader tradition can be. This text can teach not just philological skills, literary history, or appreciation of the natural world, but can also provoke discussion of contemporary, as well historical, political realities: the real effect on scholarship (and on the text) of an unrepresentative academy, past and present; the ways in which imperial power is facilitated and legitimised by writers, journalists, and academics; how the Georgics offers a glimpse into the history of Europe’s relationship with peoples and places beyond its (self-defined) political or cultural borders, and how that relationship still informs, in a global context, issues like climate crisis, food and textile production, and contemporary forms of imperial power.

Dr Charlie Kerrigan recently received his PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. Readers seeking fuller substantiation of the above are directed to the open access version of his dissertation, available here.

Who do we think we are?

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This is a blog post by Donna Zuckerberg (Eidolon), following up on her keynote at our 2018 AGM. We would like to thank Donna again for her important contribution to the day.

Who Do We Think We Are?

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of (virtually) speaking to the attendees of the WCC’s AGM about harassment and abuse. I spent a significant portion of that talk recounting my own experiences, but I want to summarize my argument here – and hopefully encourage further discussion.

I believe that when you’re receiving a massive volume of trolling and harassment – much of which is specifically calibrated to make you doubt your sense of logic and reality, and much of which is designed to make you doubt your credentials and qualifications – and you’re also trying to cope with the near-certainty that some of the people you work with in a professional context either agree with the trolls or at least feel that you brought the trolling on yourself by engaging in public scholarship – it is almost impossible to respond to even the most respectful, collegial critique without feeling attacked, often to a degree that is entirely disproportionate to how the critique was intended. So if we as a field want to be thoughtful and compassionate toward victims of harassment, we need to rethink the tone, tenor, and timing of even our professional, collegial discourse.

Laurie Penny recently wrote: “Unless you’re on the receiving end, it might seem strange, even offensive, to equate mainstream critique with the outright violence of anonymous far-right and anti-woman extremists. But for those of us who go through it every day, the context collapses into a flat field where people are firing at you from all sides and there’s no cover, not for you… Whoever you ask, it’s always someone else doing the real harassment — it’s those men over there who are violent and sexist, whereas our way of dealing with difficult women is reasonable and fair. It’s legitimate critique.” She continues, “Most people experiencing the spittle-flecked, dedicated kill-you-cunt wank-mobbery of the comments section are also subject to the self-satisfied concern-trolling of the top half of the internet.”

I can attest to the truth of this statement. As I was receiving an avalanche of abuse, a former coworker of mine at the Paideia Institute sent me a message telling me that he was deeply sorry for what I was going through and his children were praying for me. But he also wanted me to publish in Eidolon a response he’d written to “How to Be a Good Classicist Under a Bad Emperor,” the article I’d written that had led to my harassment. In his response, he argued that the real victims are the professors who are sympathetic to some of the Alt-Right’s less openly offensive ideas and who have been silenced and shamed by thought-policing arguments like the one I made in my piece. I was then pressured by another colleague to publish the piece to show the scope of my dedication to spirited yet civil disagreement. But while the tone of the dialogue was civil, and the tone of the first colleague’s email could even be called kind, I felt attacked.

I’ve also received many messages from people I don’t know that say, more or less, “I hate that you’re getting death threats, but I also think that you absolutely could not be more wrong.” On a surface level, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of message, and I believe that it is sent with good intentions. But I want to argue that it is unreasonable, even cruel, to expect or demand from someone to whom you send that kind of message that they respond by engaging dispassionately with your reasoned critique of their argument. And if we agree that we have some kind of ethical responsibility to protect, or at least support, our colleagues who experience trolling and harassment, we need to reconceptualize how we want to have professional disagreements with each other.

But does this ethical responsibility exist? Obviously, many among us would say that it does not. I speak about this issue very much from the context of someone who was educated in and operates in the United States, where whether to engage in public scholarship is still a choice. My understanding is that the situation in the United Kingdom with the REF is much more complex – that, indeed, one could make an argument that public engagement is mandatory in the UK, and not a choice at all. In that case, the ethical responsibility would seem to me to be obvious. But even if one does have a choice in the matter, as my colleagues in the U.S. do, I think that responsibility still exists. This is a key part of an argument made by Tressie McMillam Cottom, who argues that “public engagement” is often conceptualized as a de facto good without reference to a cui bono. She argues, in effect, that the neoliberal university encourages professors to put themselves into positions where they are likely to become the targets of vicious online attacks. She writes, “Academic capitalism promotes engaged academics as an empirical measure of a university’s reputational currency.” This is important to remember because the “decision” to engage publicly can, to an observer, look like shameless self-promotion or attention-seeking.

Many people who engage in public scholarship do so out of a genuine desire to democratize knowledge about our field and partially because of immense pressure from both within and without the university to justify the existence of the humanities through public engagement. That kind of pressure is real and very powerful. So while the question of whether or not to engage in public scholarship may indeed be a personal choice, it is a choice that benefits not only the person who engages, but in some ways the entire discipline. There are many of our colleagues who don’t really want to write for the general public, even in the face of all that pressure, and we should absolutely support that decision – but those colleagues may then have an even more pressing obligation to support those of our colleagues who do venture out into the treacherous domain of the internet and are then punished for it.

So if you agree with me that we have an ethical responsibility to support our colleagues who are harassed for their public scholarship, and you also agree that it is extremely difficult for those colleagues to respond in an appropriate manner to reasoned critique, how do we protect our ability to critique each other? Because, of course, that ability is of the utmost importance to us. It is, more or less, what academia is for: we put forward our ideas, we disagree with each other, we try to move discourse forward. We have to be able to disagree, even vigorously, with our colleagues. And sometimes the harassment of those colleagues is triggered by an argument that we may feel needs to be critiqued and contextualized. How we handle that critique and contextualization, however, will be the key question here.

Many of my suggestions here are simple common sense. If your colleague is being harassed, be kind. Be supportive. Tell them her you respect her, and resist the efforts made by trolls to minimize her accomplishments and frame her as a vapid attention-seeker. That kind of support can really make a difference to a colleague who’s experiencing gaslighting. Troll attacks are designed to make their victims doubt reality, and you can help her remember what reality looks like.

But maybe you feel that the reality is that your colleague was wrong, or could have made her argument with more thought or nuance. If you feel that way, and you’re tempted to engage her about it, think carefully first about what you’re trying to accomplish by it. Are you hoping to convince your colleague that she made a mistake? Because I guarantee, if she’s experiencing a troll storm, she already feels that way. She probably feels like it was a mistake to ever express any opinion in public. Or maybe your goal is to show that reasonable, civil discourse can still exist between colleagues?

If so, I would like to suggest: don’t address your critique directly to your colleague. Think carefully about who your intended audience really is. If the harassment is ongoing, then it is cruel to make your colleague the intended audience of your critique, and you may be contributing to her trauma. So don’t frame it as an attempt to engage, or an “open letter.”

By all means, make a bigger, more thoughtful argument about why what your colleague said was made from flawed premises. Stay far, far away from ad hominem attacks – engage with the ideas, but not with the individual. When the tidal wave of abuse has gone back out to sea, maybe she’ll be able to confront your argument in a substantive manner and really hear you and take it to heart. But let it be her choice whether to come to you and debate the issue, and maybe extended her a little more latitude than you normally would if her response to you seems a little disproportionately emotional or defensive. To you, it may just be another professional discussion, but to her it’s part of a much larger and nastier phenomenon.

But remember: if your intended audience for your critique is not your colleague, but rather a general public to whom you want to explain why her arguments were flawed, then your goal is, in fact, to engage in a form of public scholarship. Which means that you’ll be putting yourself out there too. You may be the next target. You won’t deserve to be, of course, but if you are, you’ll need support.

People like to say, “If you do X, you’re letting the trolls win.” If you let them get to you. If you pay attention to them. If you let them silence you. But I think the biggest victory for the trolls would be if we let them poison further our professional environment. So how we treat each other will reveal not just who we think we are as a discipline, but who we really are.

Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton, and her writing has appeared in the TLS, Jezebel, The Establishment, and Avidly. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in Fall 2018.

Mid-Career Event

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The Women’s Classical Committee UK is organising an event aimed at mid-career scholars, to be held on Monday 26th March 2018 in the Classics Department, Durham University, from 11am to 4.30pm. These times allow for same-day rail travel from as far as St Andrews and London.

Attendees at our first mid-career workshop in December 2016 reported that they found it incredibly helpful in developing their ideas and strategies concerning the issues and challenges that face women academics at mid-career, and as a result we plan to make this an annual event, held in different venues around the country in turn. Topics to be discussed may include decisions about whether and when to move institutions, questions around disciplinarity/interdisciplinarity and collaboration in research, expectations about international mobility and balancing this with family/caring duties, managing institutional expectations (which may be gendered) around types and levels of administrative service, taking on leadership positions, and strategies to tackle unconscious bias in the workplace. Those who register their interest in participating will be invited to fill in an online questionnaire, the results of which will inform the precise choice of topics for discussion sessions. We envisage that the day’s discussions will help to set priorities for resource development and future campaigns by the Women’s Classical Committee.

The WCC recognises that the term ‘mid-career’ is open to a range of interpretations, but also that different challenges face women in classics in different situations and career stages. This event is aimed primarily at women who have already achieved employment stability and established a publication profile. If the event is oversubscribed then we will give priority to women in this situation, but we welcome applications to register from anyone of any gender who feels they would benefit from attending.

To declare your interest in participating in this event please register at https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/womens-classical-committee-uk-mid-career-event-tickets-41832029727 by Monday 5 February 2018. The workshop is free to WCC UK members; for non-members the cost is £10 per head, to cover provision of lunch and other refreshments. The venue will be accessible to all participants.

Dr Stephe Harrop (Liverpool Hope), Dr Jo Paul (Open), Dr Amy Russell (Durham)

For any queries about this event, please contact womensclassicalcommittee@gmail.com. For more information on the Women’s Classical Committee, including our aims and activities and how to join, please see https://wcc-uk.blogs.sas.ac.uk/.

Child-friendly policy

The Women’s Classical Committee is committed to making our events as inclusive as possible, and recognises that the financial and practical challenges of childcare often impede people from participating in workshops and conferences. Anyone who needs to bring a dependent child or children with them in order to participate in one of our events is usually welcome to do so, but we ask you to inform of us this in advance so that we can take them into account in our event planning and risk assessment. The safety and well-being of any children brought to our events remain at all times the responsibility of the parent or carer. While we do our best to ensure that rest and changing facilities are available for those who may need them, this will depend on the individual venue we are using. Again, please contact us in advance to discuss your needs, and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Save the date: second WCC-UK mid-career event

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Have you fallen off a mentorship cliff? Are you wondering how to balance research, teaching, and administrative service? Do you wonder how, or if, you should move into leadership positions? Are you struggling to find work-life balance as a university academic?

Following the success of our December 2016 event, the Women’s Classical Committee UK is organising a second day of informal discussion focusing on the issues and challenges facing mid-career scholars. We will meet on Monday 26th March 2018 at Durham University from 11.30am to 5pm, which should allow train travel on the day from as far as St Andrews, Oxford, Cambridge, or London. The programme will be tailored to the interests and needs of those attending.

This event is aimed primarily at women Classicists who have already achieved employment stability and established a publication profile but have not yet, or have only recently, been promoted to Professor. If the event is oversubscribed we will give priority to applicants who fit this description, but all are welcome. It will be free to members and £10 for non-members, to include lunch, and the usual WCC event policies will apply (meaning that you are welcome to bring a child or children with you, and that we aim to meet all participants’ accessibility needs).

Keep an eye open for fuller details and registration, here and on the Liverpool List, in the new year!

Late Antique Empresses at the International Medieval Congress, Leeds, July 2018

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The International Medieval Congress, held annually at the University of Leeds, is the biggest event on the European medieval studies calendar. The 2017 conference hosted 2,100 actively-involved participants coming from over fifty countries to present their research or contribute to round-table discussions. The WCC established a presence at the IMC in 2017 with two round-tables on feminist pedagogy and periodisation. Following the success of these events, the WCC is pleased to announce that a double-panel on late antique empresses will feature at the forthcoming IMC, organised by Prof. Julia Hillner (University of Sheffield) and Dr Victoria Leonard (Institute of Classical Studies, London). The panels are jointly sponsored by the WCC and the Medieval and Ancient Research Centre, University of Sheffield (MARCUS).

All are welcome!

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Session 218 – Mon. 02 July – 14.15-15.45 

Panel 1: The Late Antique Empress, I: How to Read, Write, and View Imperial Women

Historical studies on late antique empresses have usually been biographies of well-known empresses or single dynasties. This session – the first of two proposed – offers an interdisciplinary perspective on imperial women’s representation and agency. It explores three methodological approaches to the topic: biography, topography, and iconography. Paper
A assesses the benefits and challenges of the biographical approach in light of gender history; paper B investigates how the study of public space impacts on our understanding of imperial women’s role at court; and paper C analyses the relationship between the late antique empress’s image and the cult of the Virgin Mary.

Organised by Julia Hillner, Department of History, University of Sheffield and Victoria Leonard, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

Chaired by Robin Whelan, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) / Brasenose College, University of Oxford

Paper A: Julia Hillner, ‘Empress, Interrupted: Writing the Biography of a Late Antique Imperial Woman’
Paper B: Robert Heffron, Department of History, University of Sheffield, ‘Women on the Move: Representations of Imperial Women and Urban Space in Late Antique Rome and Constantinople’
Paper C: Maria Lidova, British Museum, London / Wolfson College, University of Oxford, ‘Late Antique Empresses and the Queen of Heaven: On the Correlation between   Sacred and Secular in the Imagery of a Female Potentate’

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Session 318 – Mon. 02 July – 16.30-18.00

Panel 2: The Late Antique Empress, II: Imperial Women between Court Politics and ‘Barbarian’ Kings

This is the second session offering new work on late antique empresses. It focuses on case studies that are rarely discussed or in need of reassessment, as they have significant things to tell us about late antique ecclesiastical, military and political developments. Paper A investigates the changing relationship between state and church through Justina’s role in 4th-century Milan; paper B asks how a reinterpretation of Galla Placidia’s Visigothic marriage as war captivity affects our understanding of Roman-Barbarian relationships; and paper C explores the rising power of late 5th-century imperial women through the burial of the disgraced Verina by her daughter, Ariadne.

Organised by Julia Hillner, Department of History, University of Sheffield and Victoria Leonard, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London

Chaired by Richard Flower, Department of Classics & Ancient History, University of Exeter

Paper A: Belinda Washington, Independent Scholar, Edinburgh, ‘Reviewing the Roles of 4th-Century Imperial Women: The Case of Justina’
Paper B: Victoria Leonard, ‘Galla Placidia as ‘Human Gold’: Consent and Autonomy in the Early 5th-Century Western Mediterranean’
Paper C: Margarita Vallejo-Girvés, Departamento de Historia y Filosofía, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, ‘Return of the Confined Empress: The Burial of Verina’

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If you can’t attend in person follow on Twitter: Victoria Leonard (@tigerlilyrocks) and Julia Hillner (@WritingHelena)

Adjacent, Alternative and Post-Academic Careers in and around Classics

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The Women’s Classical Committee UK is delighted to announce the following event:

Adjacent, Alternative and Post-Academic Careers in and around Classics

8th September 2017
University of Birmingham

The Women’s Classical Committee UK is organising a day of workshops and discussion groups to highlight the many and varied careers, jobs, pursuits, and opportunities that lie around and beyond an academic career.

We hope to build both confidence and a community at this event by making a space to share a variety of post-PhD and early-career experiences. The focus will be empowering participants to see and seek out employment that values their particular skills and interests.

As with all WCC events, travel bursaries will be available for students and the un/under-employed.

PROGRAMME

10.30-11am – Coffee and Registration

11-11.30am – Welcome and introduction

11.30-12.30pm – We have skills!
Making your CV work beyond academia – A CV workshop with Chris Packham and Holly Prescott (University of Birmingham)

Lunch

1.15-2pm – Getting Creative
Sharing ideas on how to build a classicist/classical identity beyond academia.

2-2.45pm – Classics and Public Learning
The opportunities for academics in non-academic institutions, with Andrew Roberts (English Heritage)

Tea

3-4pm – Taking Classicists to School
Careers in teaching, outreach and HE administration, with Frances Child, Polly Stoker, Oonagh Pennington Wilson, and Tamsin Cross.

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Attendance is free for WCC UK members, £10 for non-members (to cover catering costs). You can join the WCC UK here (and if you’re a student, underemployed, or unemployed, membership is only £5).

If you would like to attend this event, registration is now open on Eventbrite. Paid-up members of the WCC UK have received instructions over e-mail on how to access their free tickets. If you need the instructions to be resent, please e-mail us at womensclassicalcommittee AT gmail.com.

If you have any other questions about the event, please email Dr. Lucy Jackson (lucy.jackson AT kcl.ac.uk).

The WCC is committed to providing friendly and accessible environments for its events, so please do get in touch if you have any access, dietary, or childcare enquiries.

Child-friendly policy

The Women’s Classical Committee is committed to making our events as inclusive as possible, and recognises that the financial and practical challenges of childcare often impede people from participating in workshops and conferences. Anyone who needs to bring a dependent child or children with them in order to participate in one of our events is usually welcome to do so, but we ask you to inform of us this in advance so that we can take them into account in our event planning and risk assessment. The safety and well-being of any children brought to our events remain at all times the responsibility of the parent or carer. While we do our best to ensure that rest and changing facilities are available for those who may need them, this will depend on the individual venue we are using. Again, please contact us in advance to discuss your needs, and we will do our best to accommodate them.

Wikipedia Editathon – update

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On Monday 23rd January 2017 the Women’s Classical Committee held a Wikipedia training/editing event at the Institute of Classical Studies in London. This event was designed to begin redressing the gender imbalance in Wikipedia’s representation of classical scholars. Supported by expert trainers from Wikimedia UK, participants (both those in the room and others joining by Skype from as far away as Argentina) learned the basics of creating and editing Wikipedia pages as well as hearing more about some of the initiatives run by Wikimedia to promote gender equality on the site (take a look, for example, at Wikipedia’s Women in Red project or 100 Women, run in conjunction with the BBC). We were then able to begin creating new pages for scholars who had so far been overlooked in the online encyclopaedia, and to expand on those which were lacking in detail.

At the start of the day it was estimated that only 10 per cent of Wikipedia’s approximately 200 biographies of classical scholars were focused on women; as a direct result of the event around fifteen more women scholars are now represented on the site. These include Miriam Griffin (who was until now mentioned only in a dead link on her husband’s page), Jenny Strauss Clay and Christiane Sourvinou-Inwood. Since then participants have been continuing with their editing work, and we plan to keep up the momentum with future face-to-face training events as well as a monthly remote editing session, to be held from 1-3pm on the 22nd of every month. If you’re interested in participating in future sessions please see the project page for further details and some tips on getting started, and follow #WCCWiki on Twitter.

Many thanks to everyone who participated in the Wikipedia Editathon! If you missed it, please take a look at the Storify of the day, which includes links to some of the new Wikipedia articles. Participant Leen Van Broeck has also blogged about the event here.

You can also watch a video from Wikimedia UK about our Editathon:

Participant Ellie Mackin has also made a video about the Editathon, which you can watch below.

The organisers would like to thank Wikimedia UK and the Institute of Classical Studies for their generous support of the event.

WCC AGM “Diversity in Classics” – Call for Papers

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The Women’s Classical Committee UK is pleased to announce its 2017 Annual General Meeting, “Diversity in Classics”, on Thursday 20th April 2017 at the Ioannou Centre, Oxford.

The AGM seeks to highlight current feminist and gender-informed research in classical studies, and to discuss issues facing women in Classics. Through a series of talks and discussions we will address the question of diversity in Classics, present new research, and report back on the activities of the WCC UK during its first year.   

We are also reserving time during the day’s schedule for a series of short (five-minute) spotlight talks by delegates. Through this session, we hope to provide a chance for delegates to share projects, experiences or research connected to the WCC’s aims. We are particularly interested in talks that address the AGM’s theme of diversity in Classics; that highlight new, feminist, intersectional and gender-informed work in Classics, ancient history, classical reception or pedagogy (inside and outside the university sector); and that feature new work by postgraduate students and early-career researchers. If you would like more information or to volunteer to give one of these talks, please e-mail Carol Atack (carol.atack@st-hughs.ox.ac.uk). The deadline for expressing interest is 5pm on Friday 10th March.

People of any gender expression or identity who support the WCC’s aims are welcome to attend this event. For further details, see our website at http://wcc-uk.blogs.sas.ac.uk/about-us/.

For more information on the Women’s Classical Committee, including our aims and activities and how to join, please see our website http://wcc-uk.blogs.sas.ac.uk/about-us/join-us/

 

Child-friendly policy

The Women’s Classical Committee is committed to making our events as inclusive as possible, and recognises that the financial and practical challenges of childcare often impede people from participating in workshops and conferences. Anyone who needs to bring a dependent child or children with them in order to participate in one of our events is usually welcome to do so, but we ask you to inform us of this in advance so that we can take them into account in our event planning and risk assessment. The safety and well-being of any children brought to our events remain at all times the responsibility of the parent or carer. While we do our best to ensure that rest and changing facilities are available for those who may need them, this will depend on the individual venue we are using. Again, please contact us in advance to discuss your needs, and we will do our best to accommodate them.