• What Is a Future for Classics?
• Erika Zimmermann Damer (bio)

I contemplate this question as a mid-career professor at a small liberal arts university in the mid-Atlantic, and I ask it mindful of the panel in our field that brought national attention to the future of Classics in 2019, and in conversation with critical dialogues that preceded and emerged from that panel, including those in this issue. From where I sit, Classics is both remarkably changed from my own experience as an undergraduate and graduate student, and quite recognizable. I am not certain that we are in crisis so much as in a moment with welcome changes happening across many parts of our lives as teachers, scholars, and as a learned community. The elements that bring students into a small liberal arts college program in Classics are much the same where I live as where I studied, but the ways we teach, the content we incorporate, and our methods of scholarly engagement have changed. Classics is by nature a conservative field, where our shared goal is to continue to introduce new generations of students and the public to the languages, cultures, and material remains of the ancient Mediterranean, especially that of Greek- and Latin-speaking spaces, and to maintain the ongoing textual and material transmission of a small slice of antiquity to our twenty-first-century communities. Thinking about this question brings me first to a gentle critique of classics pedagogy, and second toward looking at some of the new developments that can broaden the field.

First, I'd like to introduce a compassionate critique of our field. As a faculty member who also led the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program on my campus, and who co-teaches and writes with colleagues in other humanities disciplines, I have found that Classics still harbors some troubling values, including a propensity to value objective data over the human, embodied, sensory, emotional world. We overvalue formal written perfection over creative forms of inquiry, and we often reject knowledges from other fields in ways that isolate us from our peers in literary, performance, and cultural studies. In practice, this can mean that we teach a narrow canon of texts with both difficult and exclusionary pedagogy unrecognizable to our peers in modern languages. Our focus on prescriptive linguistic precision in understanding [End Page 47] Greek and Latin and our emphasis on errors in student's writing, in particular, align uncomfortably closely with elements of what Tema Okun (in 1999, revised in 2021) identified as white supremacy culture, or the systems of belief that normalize white middle- and upper-class values as universal, ideal, and dominant. These beliefs include perfectionism, that there is a single correct path, and avoidance or fear of conflict, and can stifle inventive, critical, and cooperative engagement with antiquity. At worst, we practice color-blind Classics, leaving unchallenged ideas purporting the centrality of Greek and Roman civilizations to later European and American cultures, and ignore the ethical imperative to acknowledge that race, race-making, and racism emerge both in the texts we study and teach and in those we exclude from our classes. At the same time, scholars and teachers around the country are rapidly shifting how we study and teach Classics in thrilling ways.

I'd like now to look at some new forms of scholarly engagement that would have been unrecognizable to me in the late 1990s, when I first started studying ancient Greek, and then Latin, at a small liberal arts college in Iowa. The first is the digital turn—and the types of collaborative, connected scholarship the internet has made possible. Bryn Mawr Classical Review has just celebrated thirty years of publishing reviews online, the Perseus Project is thirty-five, JSTOR is nearly thirty, and pandemic closures accelerated the speed at which a huge variety of texts, museum, and library resources became available online. These early digital humanities projects shaped how I became a professor and a scholar. These are such powerful tools connecting our field, and they grant such easy access to primary sources and scholarly thought, that my students often laugh at my expectation that they use print books in the library...

• 经典的未来是什么？
• 埃里卡·齐默尔曼·达默（简介）

作为大西洋中部一所小型文科大学的职业生涯中期教授，我思考这个问题，我提出这个问题时要考虑到我们领域的一个小组，该小组在 2019 年引起了全国对古典学未来的关注，并与批评人士进行了对话该小组之前和小组中进行的对话，包括本期的对话。从我所处的位置来看，古典学与我作为本科生和研究生的经历相比发生了显着变化，而且非常容易辨认。我不确定我们是否正处于危机之中，但作为教师、学者和学术界，我们生活的许多方面正在发生可喜的变化。将学生带入小型文理学院古典文学课程的要素与我居住的地方和我学习的地方大致相同，但我们的教学方式、我们纳入的内容以及我们的学术参与方法都发生了变化。古典学本质上是一个保守的领域，我们的共同目标是继续向新一代学生和公众介绍古地中海的语言、文化和物质遗迹，特别是希腊语和拉丁语空间的语言、文化和物质遗存，以及维持一小部分古代文献向我们二十一世纪社区的持续文本和物质传输。思考这个问题首先让我对古典教育学进行温和的批评，其次让我审视一些可以拓宽该领域的新发展。

首先，我想对我们的领域提出富有同情心的批评。作为一名在我的校园里领导女性、性别和性研究项目的教职人员，并与其他人文学科的同事共同教学和写作，我发现古典文学仍然蕴藏着一些令人不安的价值观，包括价值观倾向关于人类、具体、感官、情感世界的客观数据。我们高估了正式书面形式的完美性，而不是创造性的探究形式，并且我们经常拒绝其他领域的知识，从而将我们与文学、表演和文化研究领域的同行隔离开来。在实践中，这可能意味着我们用现代语言的同行无法识别的困难且排他性的教学法来教授狭隘的文本规范。我们对理解[第 47 页]希腊语和拉丁语的规定性语言准确性的关注，以及对学生写作错误的重视，尤其与特马·奥肯（Tema Okun，1999 年，2021 年修订）所认定的白人至上文化的元素密切相关，令人不安，或将白人中上层阶级价值观规范为普遍的、理想的和占主导地位的信仰体系。这些信念包括完美主义、认为只有一条正确的道路、避免或害怕冲突，并可能扼杀对古代的创造性、批判性和合作性的参与。在最坏的情况下，我们实践无色盲的经典，留下未经挑战的观念，声称希腊和罗马文明对后来的欧洲和美国文化具有中心地位，而忽视了承认种族、种族制造和种族主义都出现在我们的文本中的道德义务。学习和教学，以及我们将其排除在课堂之外的内容。与此同时，全国各地的学者和教师正在以令人兴奋的方式迅速改变我们学习和教授古典文学的方式。

现在，我想了解一些新的学术参与形式，这些形式在 20 世纪 90 年代末期是我无法认识的，当时我在爱荷华州的一所小型文理学院第一次开始学习古希腊语，然后又学习拉丁语。第一个是数字化转型，以及互联网使协作、互联学术的类型成为可能。《布林莫尔古典评论》刚刚庆祝了在线发表评论三十周年，珀尔修斯项目已经三十五年了，JSTOR 也将近三十周年了，大流行病的关闭加快了在线提供大量文本、博物馆和图书馆资源的速度。这些早期的数字人文项目塑造了我成为一名教授和学者的方式。这些是连接我们领域的强大工具，它们使人们能够轻松获取主要资源和学术思想，以至于我的学生经常嘲笑我期望他们在图书馆使用印刷书籍......