The Classical is Political


A Discussion featuring Donna Zuckerberg,
Jonathan Hsy, and Caroline Stark

Wednesday, April 24 at 6:00 pm
Doors open at 5:30 pm

Directions and Visitor information

From philosophical principles to architectural grandeur, reminders are everywhere that the Classical is fundamentally political in the U.S. Yet activism and advocacy are sometimes viewed as distractions from — or even enemies of — true scholarship. Donna Zuckerberg, Jonathan Hsy, and Caroloine Stark will discuss ways to connect and integrate political action with the Classics.

About the Panelists

Donna Zuckerberg

Donna Zuckerberg is the author of Not All Dead White Men: Classics and Misogyny in the Digital Age (Harvard University Press, 2018). She received her Ph.D. from Princeton University in 2014 and is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon, a prize-winning online publication for informal Classics scholarship. Her writing has appeared in the Washington Post, the TLS, and Jezebel. She lives in California with her two sons and bulldog.

Jonathan Hsy

Jonathan Hsy in an Associate Professor of English at George Washington University whose research and teaching engage medieval literature with contemporary cultural theory (including intersecting approaches to gender, race, and disability). He has published widely on the global reception of medieval European literary traditions, and he is completing a short book on antiracism and Medieval Studies. He is co-editor of Bloomsbury’s forthcoming Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, and he is completing a study of life-writing by medieval authors who self-identified as blind or deaf. Hsy serves on the Advisory Board of the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship and is a co-founder of Medievalists of Color, co-director of Global Chaucers, co-blogger at In The Middle, and co-facilitator of a crowdsourced bibliography on race and Medieval Studies.

Hsy’s publications have appeared in the Cambridge Companion to the Body in Literature, Early Modern Women Journal, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, Literature Compass, New Medieval Literatures, PMLA, and postmedieval.

Caroline Stark

Caroline Stark received a PhD in Classics and Renaissance Studies from Yale University and is Assistant Professor of Classics at Howard University. Her research interests include ancient cosmology, anthropology, ethnography, and the reception of classical antiquity in Medieval and Renaissance Europe and in Africa and the African Diaspora. She is co-editing A Companion to Latin Epic 14-96 CE for Wiley-Blackwell and has published numerous articles on the reception of classical antiquity in the literature and art of Medieval and Renaissance Europe and in African American literature and film.