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).
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
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
Are you a late antique specialist gearing up for the Leeds International Medieval Conference next week? Then you should know about our two co-sponsored WCC UK panels, both exploring the figure of the late antique empress! These have been organised by Victoria Leonard of the WCC UK in partnership with Julia Hillner, and are cosponsored by the Medieval & Ancient Research Centre, University of Sheffield . The details are as follows:
Session 218 The Late Antique Empress, I: Imperial Women between Court Politics and ‘Barbarian’ Kings
Monday 2 July 2018: 14.15-15.45
Moderator/Chair: Richard Flower, Department of Classics & Ancient History, University of Exeter
-a: Reviewing the Roles of 4th-Century Imperial Women: The Case of Justina – Belinda Washington, Independent Scholar, Edinburgh -b: Galla Placidia as ‘Human Gold’: Consent and Autonomy in the Early 5th-Century Western Mediterranean – Victoria Leonard, Institute of Classical Studies, University of London -c: Return of the Confined Empress: The Burial of Verina – Margarita Vallejo-Girvés, Departamento de Historia y Filosofía, Universidad de Alcalá de Henares
This session 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; paper -c explores the rising power of late 5th-century imperial women through the burial of the disgraced Verina by her daughter, Ariadne.
Session 318 The Late Antique Empress, II: How to Read, Write, and View Imperial Women
Monday 2 July 2018: 16.30-18.00
Moderator/Chair: Robin Whelan, Department of History, University of Liverpool
-a: Empress, Interrupted: Writing the Biography of a Late Antique Imperial Woman – Julia Hillner, Department of History, University of Sheffield -b: Women on the Move: Representations of Imperial Women and Urban Space in Late Antique Rome and Constantinople – Robert Heffron, Department of History, University of Sheffield -c: Late Antique Empresses and the Queen of Heaven: On the Correlation between Sacred and Secular in the Imagery of a Female Potentate – Maria Lidova, British Museum, London / Wolfson College, University of Oxford
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, paper -c analyses the relationship between the late antique empress’s image and the cult of the Virgin Mary.
Our incoming co-chair, Virginia Campbell, reports on the recent AGM.
In April, the WCC UK held its third AGM, with a programme dedicated to the theme of Activism. This is a topic that brought together different strands of conversations, discussions and criticisms, mostly from previous WCC events. Our focus was how we, as individuals and as a group, can effect change within our discipline, HE generally, and in the wider world. To this end, the programme was quite full – including two speakers, a workshop, a panel discussion, and spotlight talks.
Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz opened the programme discussing her work teaching Greek literature to prisoners. As someone who was one of the organising members of the WCC in the US in the 1970s, has worked in various prison systems creating spaces for education and outreach, and is involved with the committee for Classics and Social Justice, she has spent a large part of her career embodying the idea of activism in combination with the discipline of Classics. She spoke not only about her work as an activist but also as a Classicist, and the importance of using our discipline for good. ‘We are disciplined by the discipline,’ she said, but scholarship can change the way people think if we find new ways to study antiquity whilst simultaneously deconstructing the idea of civilisation as a Western, white male construct. Her ways forward include teaching material that will be problematic to many people in the room, combating the use of ancient history to justify white supremacy, and negotiating the line between doing what we do versus acknowledging the damage done by traditional notions of classics.
Spotlight talks then featured speakers discussing work using aspects of Classics and Archaeology to educate, promote a sense of community and well-being, and give voices to traditionally under-represented or marginalised groups by approaching the ancient world from different perspectives. For example , one speaker addressed the political nature of teaching Virgil’s Georgics, which is not just about philological skills or the appreciation of beauty, but about the most pressing of current social issues and how to challenge the workings of power; and how Roman imperial actions against colonised peoples, including cotton groves in Ethiopia, were used to justify British colonial policy.
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 Kerriganrecently 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.
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.
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