December Research Update

Amici!  It is now (by the time you read this) 2021!  Congratulations, we made it.

With the semester done, December was a bit more productive from a scholarly standpoint.  Article II is now officially in review (though as I have noted before, I have first sent it to a high-rejection-rate journal, so it is very likely it will need to be resubmitted elsewhere).  For those curious on what the lifecycle of a peer-reviewed history article is, we actually covered that back in the March 2020 Research Update.  In any event, it will likely be 3-4 months before we find out what horrible things Reviewer 2 has to say.

As I write this, I am also working on finishing up a chapter in the book project manuscript.  We'll talk more about the book process later (once I've done more of it), but generally the best-practices is that you want a few chapters (1-2) finished before pitching a book at a press.  My hope is to be in a position to pitch successfully this coming summer.

And of course I am also getting ready to teach in the Spring (two sections of the same course I taught in the Fall, but with some TA support this time).

On Public Outreach and the classics

The end of Eidolon, which I mentioned in my fireside for this week, has prompted me to think a bit more about public engagement, particularly with reference to the classics.  One of the odd things about being an ancient historian is that I have feet and hands in several fields - history, classical philology, archaeology, military affairs, which gives ancient historians a bit of an unusual perspective in being able to sample how several fields work to engage the public differently.

Eidolon was founded to be a public-facing classics web-journal and, at least in the Classicist circles I move in, it got a lot of attention.  It had a full editorial board, attracted essays from tenured academics with prestige appointments.  It ran for five years, published 500 essays, but only got roughly the same amount of views as ACOUP this past year (as per the statistics given by Donna Zuckerberg in her parting essay).  And now Eidolon has shut down, so that window to the public is closed.

Now, on the one hand, an open, public-facing classics journal was a great idea - there should be one!  Several (see below for a few newer projects of this sort)!  But on the other hand, if Eidolon is the best the field can do in terms of actually reaching the broad public (looking at the essays they published, it is hard not to notice that many were really discussions within the discipline as to what the field should be going forward, not missives to the public), we are going to have problems in classics in the years to come.  Mary Beard cannot, after all, live forever.

And we do have problems!  According to the MLA, the number of programs in Ancient Greek has dropped 12.1% since 1990; in Latin the drop was 2.9%.  Between 2013 and 2016, undergraduate enrollment in introductory Greek dropped 21.7% (!!), enrollment in introductory Latin dropped 8.9% (!).  And that was before the disaster of the pandemic.  And that is having an impact on the field - the University of Vermont is the latest to announce plans to disband its classics and Religion departments.  Not a semester goes by that I don't get an email from either the Society for Classical Studies or the Classical Association of the Middle West and South trying to rally the troops to save an embattled Latin program at some high school or a classics department at some college.

(To be clear, I do not think that UVM's decision is actually justified by their enrollment figures.  Universities often justify shuttering humanities departments by citing their low number of majors, intentionally ignoring that the same departments teach big survey classes of non-majors and are typically some of the least expensive departments per-student-taught basis (because our classes don't require expensive labs and our professors are paid less).  Consequently, ditching departments like classics often leaves universities worse off financially in the long run.)

In short, classics as a field is teetering at the edge of crisis.  If classics, as a field, goes the way that the other language fields have gone (being rolled together into merged departments with fewer professors), it'll probably mean shedding around 1/2 to 2/3rds of the academic Classicists in the United States.  Compare the number of tenure lines, for instance, at UNC's Classics Department - I count 12 - with the number of tenure lines for say, French - I count four ('teaching' professors are semi-permanent adjuncts).  And French is a living language spoken in twenty-nine countries!

The need to rebuild public support for classics departments should be a five alarm fire in every classics program in the country.  Instead, the public engagement profile of classics is frankly disappointing.  Sure, there is Mary Beard (but note that she is an ancient historian), but otherwise, not much.

It is striking to me that the efforts to try to build public rapport come mostly from more junior, untenured classicists and disproportionately from ancient historians and archaeologists, when the largest specialty chunk in the field are philologists (that is, Greek and Latin language specialists).  There's an Ancient World Magazine (edited by a mix of ancient historians and archaeologists), an Ancient Warfare Magazine and Ancient History Magazine at Karwansaray (edited by Jasper Oorthuys).  Just recently, I noticed SASA (Save Ancient Studies), run by a mix of graduate students, early career academics and enthusiasts (almost all of them ancient history or archaeology) and endorsed by the SCS; it's clearly new, but that 'unique visitor' counter at the bottom of the page (at 7,709 when I visited; with luck we'll see it count up a lot more) needs to add some digits.

To be clear, I am not rubbishing any of these efforts - I bring them up because they are good, capable efforts and we need more of them and the field needs to shift more resources to supporting those we have.  Direct engagement with the public is the only way that any of the humanities are going to be able to survive.  And frankly, I simply do not believe that it is impossible to sell the public on the value of studying ancient literature (though I do think it probably needs to be 'ancient literature' more broadly).

The absence of the senior Classicists (particularly philologists) - often with the sort of prestige appointments that can command respect in the public discourse - from the vital task of saving the discipline is really very striking.  Apart from SASA, the near total lack of institutional support from elite institutions is also very striking (with the clear exception of the AIA and it's successful public-facing publication Archaeology;  but then you will note the archaeologists are also well represented in these grass-roots efforts.  The largest American philological professional association, the SCS, attempted the same with Amphora (2002-2015) but it closed down after, as I understand it, never really finding an audience) - there are still a number of very well funded elite programs in the classics which are strangely absent from all of this.

I find the contrast with the field of history or even just its (much smaller) subfield of military history so revealing.  I know many historians who have written for Foreign Policy, or ArcDigital, or the Bulwark, War on the Rocks, Forbes, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, and so on; some as one-offs, some with regular columns.  There is a huge public history apparatus (battlefield parks, museums, living history exhibits, etc) and academic historians engage with it regularly.  There is an entire ecosystem of history podcasts, too.  Of course, as I keep noting, Archaeology writ-large also has a much stronger outreach arm than classics, despite often still being treated as a subfield of classics in university organization.  None of that apparatus was built overnight, but if classics as a field wants to survive, they need to start building that public engagement apparatus yesterday.

Which isn't to say that everything is fantastic in History either (our enrollments tend to be some of the best in the humanities, but that's still not great!) but at least, as a discipline, we've recognized the problem and are making a real effort to make the case for the value of our field.  Obviously, for both the continuing relevance of history and of the classics, ACOUP is my small contribution to making the fields more visible and relevant.

Which of course just makes me one more data-point in that "Most of the classics evangelism is done by early career ancient historians or archaeologists with little hope of finding permanent employment in the field."

For my own subfield of ancient history, any contraction in the classics is a real problem, since teaching positions for ancient historians tend to be about evenly split between history departments and classics departments (and never quite perfectly at home in either).  But even beyond that, it is quite terrible to see the very real prospect that much of the apparatus of classical study, infrastructure built up over decades and in some cases centuries, appears poised to wither away in the the fairly near future.

And in some cases, for want of defenders within its own ranks.  A grim note to start the year out on, I suppose, but there it is.