Album of "The Führer's Trip to Italy": Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini following archaeologist & art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli. here showing a fragment depicting Saturnia Tellus, a detail of the Ara Pacis. Henrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels and Joachim von Ribbentrop are visible in the group. The work was reconstructed in 1938 in celebration of bi-millenium... Continue Reading →
What Are the Best Classics Books for Children?
Finishing my third trimester in the midst of a pandemic was not what I had planned for the last months of pregnancy. Since the Ides of March, we have sequestered ourselves in our house in Iowa City and cancelled any and all social gatherings––including the planned baby shower––as has almost everyone else across the globe.... Continue Reading →
Pro Publica: A Public Classics Workshop
Pro Publica: A Public Classics Workshop Northwestern University, October 18-19, 2019 How can we better speak and write about the ancient Mediterranean for the general public? How can academics engaged in the study of antiquity underscore the relevance of Classics in the present day? The Society for Classical Studies and the Department of Classics at... Continue Reading →
Reacting to the Racist Events At the SCS-AIA Annual Meeting in San Diego: A Roundup
[This post was originally published on the SCS Blog] It has now been a month since the SCS-AIA annual meeting in San Diego, and many have written evocative, emotional, and important pieces about the racist events that occurred there. Instead of posting each separately on our social media or blog, I have tried to compile... Continue Reading →
Book Review: Not All Dead White Men
Over on Ancient Jew Review, I have a review of Donna Zuckerberg's new book, Not All Dead White Men. The review was certainly not easy to write, but I do recommend buying, reading, and then sharing this important read. It is honestly the only time in the past two years or so that I have been happy to... Continue Reading →
The Gospel of Unicode: Digital Love Letter(s) and Art Through Numbers
Over at Hyperallergic this week, I discuss the proposed release of over 2,000 Hieroglyphs into Unicode by 2020 or 2021. If you are a classicist then you know how important the Unicode movement has been in standardizing the visualization of Greek texts in particular. But the non-profit Unicode Consortium encodes many other ancient and endangered... Continue Reading →
Replacing the Squeeze? Teaching Classical Epigraphy With 3D Models
This semester, I am incorporating more epigraphy into my undergraduate and graduate level courses. The University of Iowa has a top-flight classics program (if I do say so myself), but we do not have a proper squeeze collection to work with (something I took for granted while at UNC-Chapel Hill). As such, in addition to... Continue Reading →
Yes, Women Do Study Military History
In an important article over at Eidolon, Nadejda Williams discusses the visibility of female military historians within the field of ancient history. Prof. Williams is a Classicist whose main area of teaching and research is Greek and Roman military history. She is also is an Associate Professor of History at the University of West Georgia. I would urge you... Continue Reading →
Eating Nocturnal Fruits: A Round-Up Of My Favorite Ancient and Medieval Posts of 2017
One of my favorite reflections on the act of writing was written by a late Roman historian, poet, and rhetorician from modern-day Bordeaux named Decimius Magnus Ausonius. Among many other works, he penned a treatise called the Fasti. In a note to his son, the author reflected on the act of picking and choosing historical events, and... Continue Reading →
The Argument Made By The Absence: On Whiteness, Polychromy, And Diversity In Classics
It has been a few days since I published a piece on my Forbes blog regarding the perception of whiteness and statues in antiquity. I knew when I started taking notes on the subject of polychromy many months ago that this column would likely cause a stir within the field, among colleagues, and online. I had... Continue Reading →