We will once again be running our ‘Take a Grad Student to Lunch’ mentoring scheme at the CA/FIEC conference in London on 5th-8th July 2019. The scheme is open to WCC UK Members, and offers the opportunity for postgraduate students to seek a one-off mentoring session from a senior academic over lunch during the conference. Mentors and mentees will be matched by the WCC UK Mentoring Officer, and mentors will contact mentees directly prior to the beginning of the CA. Many mentees use the scheme to seek general advice and guidance, though more specific enquiries are welcome; mentees should note these on the application form to ensure matching with an appropriate mentor. This scheme requires a minimal time commitment on the part of the mentor: a brief email exchange to arrange the meeting, and the duration of the meeting, along with optional provision of feedback.
In order to be eligible as a mentee, you should currently be registered as an MA or PhD student or equivalent, at any stage of the process from registration through to final submission post-viva. In order to be eligible as a mentor, you should be employed on a permanent contract. We especially welcome more senior academics (e.g. Senior Lecturers, Professors) as mentors. The scheme is open to all genders. Mentors and mentees participating in the scheme are expected to abide by the WCC’s Mentoring Code of Conduct.
If you are a member of the WCC UK in good standing, you will have received an email containing details of how to sign up for the scheme. In these schemes, it is far more likely that mentees sign up than mentors, so we are keen to attract additional mentors from outside the organisation; if you are not a WCC UK member but would be willing to act as a mentor in the event of a shortage of mentors, please contact the Acting Mentoring Officer, Christine Plastow, at christine.plastow [at] open.ac.uk. Please also feel free to get in touch with any questions about the scheme
Friday June 7th, 2019 – Worsley Building, (Worsley SR 9.58b), University of Leeds
We are pleased to invite you to the Women’s Classical Committee UK’s 2019 ECR Event: Tools for a Classics Career. This event includes a series of discussions and sessions aimed at giving ECRs a range of resources and information useful for those planning or embarking upon an academic career. The programme is as follows:
10:30-11: Registration
11-12:30: Employment rights and UCU – what could your Union be doing for you?
12:30-1pm: Alternative or small sources of funding – what are they, and how can you find them?
1-2pm: Lunch
2-3:30pm: Academic career planning and prioritising – a discussion featuring academics involved in hiring at a range of institutions, on how to make decisions to best prioritise for your desired career.
3:30-4:30pm: Surviving a Teaching Fellowship – discussion with recent teaching fellows who will share their tips and advice for those working in (often temporary) teaching-only positions.
4:30-5:30pm: Toolkit Planning – a session based on the preceding sessions, aimed at planning and discussing resources which could be put together as a permanent source of help and information for ECRs in Classics.
To register, please contact Dr Jane Draycott at jane.draycott@glasgow.ac.uk. Registration is free for WCC Members, or £5 for non-members. If you’d like to become a member before the event, find out more here.
Thanks to the generous support of the Classical Association, we have bursaries available to support travel costs. Please indicate in your registration if you would like to apply for one of these.
Child-friendly Policy The Women’s Classical Committee UK 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. Attendees who wish to bring children are welcome to do so; the safety and well-being of children remains their carers’ responsibility at all times. The designated quiet room may be a suitable space for nursing.
If you have any questions, please contact the organisers: Jane Draycott (jane.draycott at glasgow.ac.uk), Kate Cook (k.j.cook at leeds.ac.uk), or Virginia Campbell (v.campbell atexeter.ac.uk)
Our 2019 AGM will take place on Friday 10th May at Cardiff University, from 10am to 6.30pm.
Registration
You can register for the event online via Eventbrite; please note that you will need to register separately for the last talk of the day, which is open to the public; free registration is also available via Eventbrite. There are options for in-person registration for the whole AGM, the morning only or the afternoon only. Spaces are limited. Registration is free for paid-up members of the WCC UK, who have received instructions on how to access this ticket type over e-mail; if you need a reminder, please drop us a note at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com.
Applications for travel and childcare bursaries are warmly welcomed from postgraduate students, early-career researchers and other low-waged attendees. If you would like to apply for a travel bursary, please e-mail Carol Atack (carolatack at gmail.com), giving your name, institution (where applicable) and reason for applying for a bursary.
Please drop us a line with any specific dietary requirements after you have registered.
Accessibility
The main entrance of the building where the AGM will take place can be accessed by a ramp or steps. There are two sets of automatic doors to enter the building. The building is equipped with two lifts. There is an accessible toilet on the ground floor of the building. We will have the use of a quiet room in a building about five minutes’ walk from where the AGM will take place. If you have more questions, please e-mail us.
Child-friendly Policy
The Women’s Classical Committee UK 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.
Attendees who wish to bring children are welcome to do so; the safety and well-being of children remains their carers’ responsibility at all times. We have access to a private room a short distance from the AGM meeting if it is required for nursing. If you would like to discuss your needs further, please get in touch.
Provisional Programme
9.30am – arrival and registration
10.00am – Welcome and WCC report – Virginia Campbell and Claire Millington, WCC UK co-chairs.
10.15am – speaker – Juliana Bastos Marques (Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro)
11.15am – break-out groups to discuss current professional issues facing women in UK classics – sign up during registration. Topics will include casualisation, the REF and Brexit, and we are very happy to take suggestions. One group will have the opportunity to explore Roman spinning techniques with Magdalena Ohrman (UWTSD).
12.30pm – lunch.
1.15pm – Foremothers panel: our speakers share the stories of some of the women who have inspired them, followed by an open floor for attendees to share their experiences. Chair: Victoria Leonard (RHUL).
Speakers: Absent Foremothers – Mathura Umachandran (Oxford) Finding foremothers as a mixed race archaeologist: challenges and hopes for the future – Zena Kamash (RHUL) When one early Professorin doesn’t make equal opportunities: what lessons do we still need to learn? – Maria Pretzler (Swansea)
2.45pm – break.
3pm – Race, ethnicity and equality in UK Classics: where are we at and what can we do? A town hall style debate which will include discussion of the recent Royal Historical Society report into Race, Ethnicity & Equality in history as a discipline. Chairs: Liz Gloyn (RHUL) and Ellie Mackin Roberts (RHUL).
4.15pm – WCC UK business meeting.
5.30pm – Foremothers: Bringing It All Back Home – Susan Deacy (Roehampton)
A note on catering: coffee is not permitted in the room where we are holding the AGM, although there is a coffee shop in the building. Lunch will be served in a building about five minutes’ walk from where the AGM will take place.
The 2019 AGM of the Women’s Classical Committee UK is generously supported by the Classical Association and the School of History, Archaeology and Religion at Cardiff University.
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).
Last week, we issued a joint statement with the Council of University Classics Departments and the Institute of Classical Studies deploring the incidents of overt racism which occurred at the AIA/SCS conference in San Diego. We repeat our censure of the behaviour targeted at Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta and at Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, representatives of the Sportula. Professor Padilla Peralta has written powerfully about his experience, while the Sportula team have responded by organising their own on-line conference. Professor Padilla Peralta has now published the text of the paper he gave at the “Future of Classics” panel which raises serious questions about the under-representation of scholarship by women and people of colour in journals in our field, and challenges us to examine the role of structural factors, unconscious and explicit prejudice, in these exclusions. We are aware that some classicists, including former and present journal editors, have begun to respond to his challenge to reflect on and transform their practice; we urge this activity to continue.
In the joint statement published on Monday, we commented that ‘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.’ Dr. Josephine Quinn has written eloquently about minimization which took place during and after the conference, both along national lines and in attempts to excuse the incident that targeted Professor Padilla Peralta by marginalising those who experience mental illness and those who work as independent scholars. The report by the Royal Historical Society on Race, Ethnicity and Equality shows the depth of the problem in one of our sister disciplines; we welcome the news in the November 2018 minutes that Council of University Classics Departments intend to commission a similar report examining the situation within our discipline.
One of the WCC UK’s aims since its foundation has been to advance equality and diversity in classics; anti-racist work is a fundamental part of supporting classics without white fragility. We support efforts of disciplinary bodies and other institutions to examine and change their own practices, and we recognise that we have much to learn both as individuals and as an organisation. In our 2018 AGM, we included a critical whiteness workshop precisely to begin talking about these issues. The workshop succeeded in that it did start a conversation, and gave us confidence that we are able to facilitate these discussions among our members. Yet we failed to anticipate that colleagues of colour would be asked to perform a disproportionate amount of labour and that we did not do all we could to prepare attendees for the kind of self-reflection necessary to engage productively in anti-racism training. We didn’t get it right – but we recognise our responsibility to learn from our mistakes and to do better.
To that end, our 2019 AGM in Cardiff will include a town hall style meeting to discuss our experiences of racism within the discipline and develop strategies to respond to them. As part of this, we intend to take account of the interconnectivity of racism and xenophobia within UK society in general, as well as drawing attention to the ways in which UK classics is robbed of the richness of perspective brought by people from all ethnic backgrounds. Moreover, we hope to support attendees in developing strategies to engage with current institutional structures that require change if we are to tackle racism head-on within the discipline. We also intend to organise a separate on-line event on activism and allyship, which will explore the various intersections between feminism, race, class and disability. Its goal will be to start developing future strategies and to give members the confidence to take grassroots action in their local communities against both highly visible and more insidious kinds of prejudice. As an organisation, we recognise the part we can (indeed, should) play in striving for inclusivity in classics and hope that these events will lay foundations for encouraging change within the discipline.
If you would like more information about the AGM, or would like to be involved in organising our on-line event, please e-mail the Administrator at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com.
We would like to issue a reminder that nominations are being solicited for candidates for the upcoming Steering Committee elections. We urge any members who are interested in increasing their involvement with the running of the WCC to nominate themselves. We also encourage members to nominate fellow members who might be interested in such a position. Nominees must be members of the WCC UK in good standing at the time of their election (please check with Carol Atack, carolatack at gmail.com, if you are unsure of your membership status).
The Steering Committee runs the WCC UK, including organizing events, workshops, and future development of the WCC UK. Committee members will serve for four years, with the option to renew for a further four year term. The Steering Committee wishes to encourage a diverse organization comprised of representatives from any background, location, or career level.
Names of nominees should be submitted to Thea Lawrence, the Elections Officer, by Friday the 25th of January 2019. Her e-mail address is thea.lawrence at nottingham.ac.uk. The Elections Officer will then contact nominees for permission to place their candidacy on the ticket. The Elections Officer will require a short CV (1 page) and an election statement from each nominee. These will be made available on the WCC UK website for members to review prior to voting. For previous examples of such materials, see here.
If you have any questions about the Steering Committee or the process of elections, please e-mail us at womensclassicalcommittee at gmail.com
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!
***
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
Feminism & Classics VIII will take place May 21–24, 2020, in Winston-Salem, hosted by the Department of Classics and the Department of Philosophy of Wake Forest University. (A CFP will come later; abstracts for proposed papers and panels will be due around September 2019.)
The co-organizers, Professor Emily Austin and Professor T. H. M. Gellar-Goad, intend to form a Program Committee not of Wake Forest faculty but of scholars from a diversity of regions, institutions, disciplines, backgrounds, career stages, and theoretical approaches — and we would like YOU to take part!
The Program Committee will have the following responsibilities, in collaboration of course with the co-organizers:
determine the conference theme, or decide not to have one (FemClas VII was “VISIONS”)
draft the CFP
evaluate, accept, and reject abstracts
assemble sessions and the program more generally
advise the co-organizers on keynote speakers, breakout sessions, programming beyond the standard conference-paper format, and so forth
If you are interested in being a member of the FemClas ProgComm, apply by emailing THM at thmgg at wfu.edu no later than February 1, 2019, with the following:
an informal statement of interest (a paragraph or so)
a current c.v.
how you’d like your name and affiliation listed
the best way(s) to contact you
The co-organisers will acknowledge receipt of applications, and will get back to all applicants by February 15. Please pass the word on to anybody you know of who might be interested!
The WCC UK steering committee is delighted to share a festive save the date for our next Annual General Meeting:
Friday 10th May 2019
Cardiff University
Theme: Foremothers
We will share more about the programme in due course; we hope that the day will give us the opportunity to reflect on those women from all around the world who have influenced us along our journeys, as well as the chance to spend some time together more informally.
Nominations are being solicited for joining the Steering Committee of the Women’s Classical Committee UK. The Steering Committee runs the WCC UK, including organizing events, workshops, and future development of the WCC UK. Committee members will serve for four years, with the option to renew for a further four year term. The Steering Committee wishes to encourage a diverse organization comprised of representatives from any background, location, or career level.
You may nominate someone or nominate yourself. Nominees must be members of the WCC UK in good standing (please check with Carol Atack, carolatack at gmail.com, if you are unsure of your membership status). Names of nominees should be submitted to Thea Lawrence, the Elections Officer, by Friday the 21st of December 2018. Her e-mail address is thea.lawrence at nottingham.ac.uk.
The Elections Officer will then contact nominees for permission to place their candidacy on the ticket. The Elections Officer will require a short CV (1 page) and an election statement from each nominee. These will be made available on the WCC UK website for members to review prior to voting. For previous examples of such materials, see here.
Voting will open on Monday 7th of January and run until Friday the 22nd of February 2019. The elected members will be announced in early March, and will assume office at the AGM in April 2019.
If you have any questions about the Steering Committee or the process of elections, please e-mail us at womensclassicalcommittee@gmail.com
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