REVIEWS, ART, GENDER
When Does Art Make Monsters of Its Fans?
Hyperallergic | 2023
As a scholar who loves Ancient Rome but hates the enslavement that sustained it, I couldn’t put [Claire Dederer’s] Monsters down after this vivid opening monstrum. (I draw here upon the word’s original Latin meaning: A “warning, omen, or spectacle worthy of wonder.”) … Do we all become monsters, in some sense, when we carve time from life for art? When we feed our burgeoning selves with art that uses or abuses others?
ACADEMIA, POLITICS, REVIEWS
Where Do We Draw the Line? Addressing Eminent Scholars’ Imperfect Pasts
Los Angeles Review of Books | 2021
Our silence is the price of admission into the old-boys’-club of academia; to break it is to prove we don’t belong. It would also force an uncomfortable and deeply resisted reckoning with the attraction of a field that continues to center elite male slave-owning perspectives among our ancient sources, to reward modern scholarship that codes white, and to dismiss minorities’ attempts to widen the epistemic playing-field as barbarianism at the gates.
Read more at LA Review of Books
RACE, GENDER, POLITICS
How Foreign Women Have Been Tokenized Since Ancient Roman Times
Hyperallergic | 2021
We can change the narrative of quiet, anonymous victimhood that surrounds Asian women in America. Let’s remember, in their faces, the faces of our own mothers and grandmothers — the strongest people we know: ancestors who crossed oceans and worked late nights so that we might someday, unimaginably, prosper. And let’s remember, too, the Asian migrants to Rome, millennia ago, who felt joys, suffering, and sometimes even acceptance that we may never know.
RACE, POLITICS, RECEPTION
The Roman Roots of Racial Capitalism
Berlin Journal | 2021
Rome forces us to confront—as smiling faces on diversity brochures never do—the troubling causal connections between demographic variety in the present and violent subjugation in the past. On the other hand, Rome’s social and belief systems were remarkably unbiased with regard to race or origin; belonging and advancement had little to do with blood or soil.
Read more at Berlin Journal
POLITICS, NATURE
We Used to Count Ourselves Kings of Infinite Space
Eidolon | 2020
I wonder if our well-intentioned attempts to make classics “relatable” are the equivalent of translating tigers into housecats. I wonder what would happen if we stopped pitching the Greeks and Romans as “just like us,” and learn to love them as [Karen] Blixen loved the lion: because they’ll never love us back, because they’ll never belong to us, because there’s nothing like a mauling to shock us into truth.
Read more at Eidolon
POLITICS, ACADEMIA
Classics and COVID-19: An Accidental Series
Eidolon | 2020
- Classical Plagues School Trump on Coronavirus: An End-of-the-World Press Conference in Hades
- Classics in a Time of Quarantine: Romans Stay Home as Coronavirus Shuts Down the U.S.
- How to Stop Worrying and Write through the Pandemic: Lessons from Ovid’s Exile, with Ten Practical Tips
- Not with a Bang but with a Whimper? Finishing a Classics PhD During the Pandemic
- Classics after Coronavirus: Prophesying the Future of Our Field
- Tending Our Field and Our Future: Classics’ New COVID-19 Relief Fund
GENDER, ACADEMIA
Not Bringing Home a Baby
Eidolon | 2019
Women’s bodies, you realize, are the true classical tradition: for millions of years, on macro and molecular levels, we’ve done intergenerational labor of preservation, replication and loss that dwarfs scribes’ transmission of a few hundred texts.
Read more at Eidolon
GENDER, REVIEWS, RECEPTION
Heroes Are a Virus From Outer Space
Eidolon | 2019
We leave home, and multiply ways to glorify our departure, because it hurts too much to stay. We’ll never again be one with our makers, mothers, or gods until we rest. The ache of this realization helps spread the contagion of heroic discovery that takes us to Troy, to space, to early graves (or sometimes just the library). But these journeys are, after all, a kind of homecoming.
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RACE, POLITICS, ACADEMIA
Turning the Tables on Dominance and Diversity in Classics
Eidolon | 2020
Words, images, and ideas do things for us, and we do things to them, every time we use them. This doesn’t mean that everything’s relative or art lacks transcendent value. It means that we need to examine modern uses of antiquity with care, precision, an eye toward their histories, motivations, and effects, and an awareness of our own.
Read more at Eidolon
RACE, REVIEWS, ACADEMIA
Crossing Cultures as a First-Generation Classicist
Eidolon | 2018
We classicists know that one empire must fall for another to rise; that the long arcs of history curve and cross over time. It was because she had no books, growing up, that my mother read to me every day, at my delighted command; that she loved me without obligations or conditions.
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POLITICS, RECEPTION
Rome’s “Empire Without End” and the “Endless” U.S. War on Terror
Eidolon | 2018
The Romans’ shifting uses and abuses of imperium provide older, and equally troubling, commentary on America’s nebulous “war on terror” — which has by now outlasted the Vietnam War and shows no signs of abating. If history does not repeat itself, but rhymes, then Rome’s “warfare without bounds” resonates with America’s present outward and inward strife.
Read more at Eidolon
REVIEWS, RECEPTION
Vergil in Westworld
Eidolon | 2017
When we juxtapose Westworld’s metaphysical schema with the Aeneid’s, we recognize ourselves as the gods who, like wanton boys to flies, have used endless fictional characters and their literary reincarnations for our sport. … Hosts, epic heroes, and their audiences are united across time by the same question: Do our narratives make us, or do we make the narrative?
Read more at Eidolon
For more of my writing for Eidolon, check out my Medium page.
For more essays, see my full CV here and my scholarly repository here.