Podcasts
How Diverse Was The Ancient Mediterranean?
Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness | 2022
If we work with an expansive definition of race — as power shaping and controlling populations through categories that are often imaginary or based on changeable factors, sometimes skin colors, sometimes gender, sometimes other things — then we have this really big lens through which we can examine the way societies put themselves together. And my students always learn a lot by traveling back to antiquity because … it helps us right some of our own very modern reflexive assumptions about race and color and ethnicity that unfortunately are baked into our country, specifically here in the US, as part of a legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.
Listen at JonathanVanNess.com
Ozymandias Project
Ancient Office Hours | 2023
Everything is reception. And if you come to it with the right eyes, you’re going to see classics in everything. … It’s the leaves on the trees on my fall walk today, which are falling down and reminding me of Dante viewing souls falling like leaves crossing to the underworld, reminding him of Vergil viewing souls falling like leaves … reminding me of Homer needing to feed ghosts blood to make them speak.
Listen at the Ozymandias Project
Bonus episode: Interview with students in Dr Pandey’s “Race before Race” seminar
Who is Classics for?
Beyond the Lecture | 2021
Like western civilization, whiteness is a concept that had to be invented. It’s not a concept that’s intrinsic to the human species. And what I think what’s fascinating about ancient Greece and Rome is that it transports us to a time before race existed as we know it.
Listen at AmericanAcademy.de
Interviews
Diversity and Accessibility of the Classics
Latin for All | Spring 2023
with Dani Kobrick and Michelle Bayouth
“People from all cultures can get so much for communing with a deeper past … My life’s mission right now is to ensure that people of any skin color, from any culture … can see that antiquity provides us with a model of human understanding and community that is precious and valuable.”
Listen to our conversation on YouTube
Your Gods Are Also Mine
University of Basel | 2021
“When Pandey tells stories, the dust of ancient languages is blown away. Or, as she puts it: ‘As long as we read these texts and they have something to say to us, they remain alive, and with them the ‘dead’ languages themselves.’”
Read more in English or in German at unibas.ch
Future of Sustainability: Looking Back to Go Forward
with Alisha Bhagat and Nour Batyne
Forum for the Future | 2021
We need to tell better stories about the past that are centered around diverse people and that different people can own and take forward. We can’t be full protagonists in the story [of the future] unless we understand the memories that shape our identities and the set of experiences that shaped the people who brought us into this world, whether you want to take that literally or metaphorically.
Read more at TheFuturesCentre.org
What Parts of Classics Would We Choose To Preserve for the Future?
with Joel Christensen, Dan-el Padila Peralta, Hannah Čulík-Baird, Amy Richlin, Samuel Ortencio Flores, Jinyu Liu, Yurie Hong, Diana Spencer, and Alice Mandell
Society for Classical Studies Blog | 2020
What would we choose to pass on to posterity from a field that’s already built on scraps of the past? And what would the texts and objects we chose to preserve say about us and our mindset during this pandemic?
Read more at Society for Classical Studies Blog
COVID-19 and the Future of Classics Graduate Study
with Del A. Maticic, Alicia Matz, Hannah Čulík-Baird, Thomas Hendrickson, Anna Pisarello, and Amy Pistone
Society for Classical Studies Blog | 2021
The intellectual and social value of the arts and humanities, humanistic education, and critical thinking and communication skills have rarely been clearer … We can no longer avoid the need to rethink and reform the traditional Classics Ph.D., from curricular and exam requirements all the way to the dissertation. Graduate students can — and indeed must — have a hand in that reform.
Read more at Society for Classical Studies Blog
Out of Africa: A Conversation with David van Schoor on Classics Without Borders
Eidolon | 2020
So classics is not just therapeutic, but it’s a tool for thinking through cultural critique — and because it’s essentially comparative and diachronic, it forces us to think about the reasons why things are.
Read more at Eidolon
Affiliated Blogs
Pasts Imperfect
A Substack for addressing forgotten, manipulated, or misunderstood global histories within the ancient world, and a network for lifting up public scholars, edited by Sarah E. Bond.
Read more at Pasts Imperfect
Adventures in Applied Classics
Essays by undergraduates in my Fall 2020 “Western Civilization” survey course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
My Life in Food
A blog of recipes and reminiscences by my amazing mother, Kulwant Pandey.