Inclusivity

The Classics Department is committed to fostering an intellectual community that recognizes and celebrates a diversity of students, faculty, and staff. This commitment is linked to our belief in the value of ensuring the creative power of everyone, of making sure that diverse talent is represented and fully voiced in our community. This, we believe, makes us better, makes us stronger. It helps foster richer classroom experiences and better scholarship. We also believe it contributes to creating a better and more inclusive society, one in which everyone has the opportunity to participate fully.

We recognize that diversity is complex and intersectional, including ethnic, racial, gender, class, and religious identities as well as diverse life and career experiences. We further recognize that diversity does not necessarily correlate with or produce equality; nevertheless, we commit to a more diverse field in our Departmental practices and in our curriculum.

We commit to a curriculum that reflects our values. Most of our courses are designed with a view to developing an analytical engagement with and recognition of historically and culturally different peoples. Such analytical perspective is required for the successful study of the ancient world – an ethnically, racially, religiously diverse cultural composite.

The study of the ancient world, we believe, provides an apt opportunity for our students to think carefully about cultural differences and how to understand them also in our time – both in our own society and globally, where respectful engagement with culturally diverse peoples is a given and the capacity to engage respectfully and learn from diverse peoples is a necessity for success.

The Department has a historical commitment to expanding the curriculum to engage with the ancient world in its complexity and to explore the influence of classical culture in contemporary contexts. Our faculty regularly teach in the general, global Humanities program for first-year students, the Women and Gender Studies Program; our faculty participate in the Feminist Inquiry Seminar, the Comparative Slavery Reading group, and the Race and Migration Studies group. Our scholarship and teaching have addressed issues of gender and sexuality, of slavery and enforced cultural subordination, and of the appropriation of classical culture by subordinated groups.

The Department has long-term participation with professional associations and groups working for social justice, particularly Women's Classical Caucus, Classics and Social Justice, and Lambda Classical Caucus. Faculty have received national recognition for community outreach work, bringing our expertise out of the academy and into the community in the service of social good.

The Department is committed to continued revisions of our curriculum and research priorities to broaden the viewpoints and experiences represented in our intellectual community. We are also devoted to continued work for a more diverse field in our commitment to our students.