Khameleon Classics

In the final episode of Khameleon Classics, host Shivaike Shah and assistant producer Malin Hay look behind the scenes at the making of the show, and discuss how a project that was conceived as a five-episode miniseries on Medea ended up becoming thirty episodes covering everything from ancient Egypt to Reconstruction-era America and beyond.

In the last decade, public statues have become a focal point for debates about the remembrance and commemoration of history. Robert E. Lee in Richmond, Virginia, Edward Colston in Bristol, and Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, Oxford: do statues of these figures remind us of their harmful legacies, or valorise them in spite of them? And how do our interpretations and misinterpretations of classical sculpture inform the style and significance of public statuary in the modern day? Shivaike Shah speaks to Verity Platt, Professor of Classics and History of Art at Cornell University, about what we get wrong about classical statues, and about the history of iconoclasm in Ancient Greece and Rome.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/statues-then-and-now

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was one of the foremost thinkers and writers about race in the period directly after Reconstruction. He was also a professor of Classics who engaged closely with a number of Greek and Roman writers, including Cicero, Aristotle and Plato. Shivaike Shah speaks to Dr Mathias Hanses, Associate Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies and African Studies at Pennsylvania State University, about his characterisation of Du Bois as a ‘Black Cicero’. What light does Du Bois shed on Cicero’s relationship with race in orations like Pro Archia Poeta? And how does an acknowledgement of Du Bois’s engagement with the Classics – and of the limitations of his approach to Black empowerment – reposition us in relation to the field today?To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-dubois

Throughout the Reconstruction era, from the end of the American Civil War in 1865 to the start of the Jim Crow era at the end of the nineteenth century, both Black activists and white supremacists used their classical education in service of their political ideals. Shivaike Shah talks to Jackie Murray, professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky, about the ways that writers engaged in dialogue with one another about the merits of Reconstruction, the status of classical education at this time, and the assumptions that such an education produced in its pupils about the inherent value of empire - irrespective of which side of the debate they were on.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-the-reconstruction

What happens when, in the wake of worldwide upheaval, a Classics department decides to put into practice the principles of anti-racism and social justice in the classroom? Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina is now the first department of Classics in the world to require coursework in critical race theory for all majors and minors. Shivaike Shah talks to the founding teachers, THM Gellar-Goad (Associate Professor at Wake Forest) and Caitlin Hines (Assistant Professor at the University of Cincinnati), about the impetus for the project, the impact it has had on the faculty, and the importance of destabilising assumptions about what ‘core’ Classics curricula should contain.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-beyond-whiteness

What can reading classical political texts teach us about our own politics? This is the question that Demetra Kasimis, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, is answering with her work, which looks at democracy and its dilemmas in the context of Ancient Greece. Her article ‘Medea the Refugee’ places Medea’s status as an immigrant in the centre of her reading of the play. Shivaike and Demetra discuss the slipperiness of political definitions and terms, both in Ancient Greece and today, and reflect on the desire, constant across space and time, for dominant powers to define political in-groups in relation to a perceived other.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-politics-of-migration

The role of Latin in Britain’s eighteenth-century Caribbean colonies was multifaceted. The ability to speak the language was a status symbol for the colonial elite, and Latin texts often served as attempted validations of the colonial project; for example, John Maynard wrote a lengthy Latin poem aiming to justify the slave trade in Barbados. But there was also the Jamaican poet Francis Williams, who achieved international fame as a writer of Latin verse and used his work to defend his right to be taken seriously as a Black poet. In this week’s episode, Dr John Gilmore of the University of Warwick speaks to Shivaike Shah about the light Francis Williams’s one surviving poem sheds on the lesser-known functions of Latin in the British colonies. He shares how Latin poetry became a conduit for arguments about the intellectual capacity of people of African descent and, by extension, about the illegitimacy of the slave trade.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/latin-poetry-in-the-caribbean

For generations, the Classical discipline’s exclusive study of Greece and Rome went unquestioned, as did its position at the heart of the humanities. Greece and Rome’s literature, art and intellectual legacy were seen not only as formative to modern culture, but as emblematic of universal value, and Classicists studied, by their own reckoning, the peak of human achievement. The emergent field of Classical Reception Studies has challenged many of these assumptions. Scholars who wish not simply to study the ancient past but rather to study the study of the ancient past have asked, why Greece and Rome? Why no other culture? And what does this act of choosing ultimately reveal? Yet even as these questions have been formulated, the response inside modern Classics has been lukewarm at best. In this podcast, Shivaike Shah is joined by Luke Richardson, formerly postgraduate teaching assistant at University College London, who researches the intellectual impact of the ongoing obsession with Greece and Rome. They discuss the seeming inability of modern Classics to come to terms with essential questions about itself and the languages of Western supremacy it represents.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classical-reception-a-failed-revolution

When we imagine the curation of antiquities, especially classical antiquities, we usually think of preserving the past within museums and other cultural institutions. But we rarely ask what we are preserving, and why, and for whom. The language of the classical has value built into it, so what would it mean to take our relationship with ‘classical’ antiquity as itself an object of curation? And in rethinking how communities have taken shape around the valuation of antiquity, how might we recognise and sustain new communities around the critical and creative engagement with the ancient Greco-Roman world? In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Professor Brooke Holmes of Princeton University about the exhibition project Liquid Antiquity, on which she collaborated with Polina Kosmadaki and Yorgos Tzirtzilakis for the DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art in 2017. Shivaike and Brooke discuss the exhibition’s driving questions and examine the fundamental issue of how we may relate to a past that, by its nature, does not survive.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/liquid-antiquity

What makes Medea a perennial figure of feminist fascination? Why was the mythological heroine marked as an icon of defiance in feminist movements throughout the twentieth century? In this week’s episode, we hear from Dr Chiara Sulprizio, a Senior Lecturer in Classical and Mediterranean Studies at Vanderbilt University. Shivaike Shah and Dr Sulprizio explore how Medea’s story of rage and otherness fed into many of the issues that were paramount to the feminist movements of the twentieth century, and consider how her unspeakable act of violence and her rejection of the roles of traditional wife and mother made themselves manifest in the theatrical productions of Euripides’s Medea from 1900 to 2000 and beyond. In doing so, they pay particular attention to how the different exigencies of successive ‘waves’ of feminism — the need by turns for political agency, liberation and recognition — created different, but linked, responses to this polarising figure.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/medea-and-twentieth-century-feminism

In 2015, the world reacted furiously to the deliberate acts of destruction that the Islamic State group (Da’esh) staged in the Roman-period city of Tadmor-Palmyra in Syria. This provoked numerous plans for reconstruction, with each proposed project claiming to offer the best technological solution for rebuilding the archaeological site. In this podcast, Shivaike Shah discusses these events and their ramifications with Dr Zena Kamash, a British-Iraqi archaeologist and Senior Lecturer in Roman Archaeology at Royal Holloway University. They consider some of the key questions in the thorny debates over how we treat our cultural heritage. Should we rebuild sites of cultural heritage destroyed in conflict, and what is the role of digital reconstruction? Does the proliferation of reconstruction projects in Tadmor-Palmyra represent a form of digital colonialism? Crucially, what alternatives might we envision?To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/tadmor-palmyra-reconstruction-digitization

Classical characters had an almost overwhelming cultural presence in eighteenth-century Europe, and Medea was no exception. In the short period between 1750 and the turn of the nineteenth century, one of the most complex characters from Greek myth appeared all over Europe, from French tragedies to Swedish operas and German melodramas. But why would a woman who kills her children be ubiquitous on European stages at a moment defined by tender motherhood and the invention of childhood? In this episode, Dr Anna Cullhed from the University of Stockholm talks to Shivaike Shah about how the ever-transforming representations of Medea in this period can help us to trace major cultural changes during this portion of European history. How does Medea highlight the ambiguity of the Enlightenment world, and in what ways did she interact with wider political contexts like empire and slavery? Dr Cullhed argues that combining the study of this epoch with a transnational perspective reveals that the granddaughter of Helios held a key position in the revolutionary eighteenth century.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/medea-in-politics-from-1750-to-1800

Egypt’s history since the fall of the Ptolemaic dynasty in 30 BC has been one of continual invasion and reinvasion. During the nineteenth century, when France and Britain began to take notice of this lucrative and strategically placed Ottoman territory, there was a boom of European interest in ancient Egyptian culture, fed by the ready availability of well-preserved ancient papyri and objects in Egypt. This week, Shivaike Shah talks to Dr Heba Abd el Gawad from University College London and Dr Usama Ali Gad from Ain Shams University about the colonisation of Egyptology and its legacy in the modern museum and university. While western museums highlight what the many Egyptian objects in their possession tell us about the ancient civilisation, those objects’ continued presence reveals more about the modern relationship between Egypt and Europe than their connection in the classical past.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-colonial-presence-in-egypt

In the modern academy, Classics – the study of ancient Greek and Roman language, culture, and society – is usually separated from Egyptology, which deals with ancient Egyptian civilisation and history. But that separation falsifies the real relationship between Greece, Rome, and Egypt, which was one of cultural exchange, commercial interdependence, and eventually colonisation. In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Professor Katherine Blouin from the University of Toronto and Professor Rachel Mairs from the University of Reading about the history of contact between Greece, Rome and Egypt, and why its importance has been downplayed in the university since the beginnings of Egyptology in the 19th century.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/egypt-greece-and-rome

Classical texts were the core of elite education in the United States from the founding of the country’s first university in the seventeenth century until the 1950s. They served as models for the crafting of the US constitution and proved foundational in the evolution of scientific thought on 'race' in America. Indeed, classical texts have been used time and again to justify enslavement, dehumanise Black and Indigenous people, craft segregation, and popularise white supremacist ideologies, all in the name of a white Euro-American or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ heritage. Why does ‘Classics’, as imagined by those who claim such heritage, continue to appear as part of far-right and conservative propaganda? And why are attempts to evolve the field to reflect the ancient world and its study more accurately met with fierce resistance? This week, Shivaike Shah speaks to Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy from Denison University about these challenging questions. Only by understanding the ways ancient Greek and Roman ideas served as a foundation for modern scientific racism, Professor Kennedy argues, can we ever seek to dismantle or even combat white supremacism in the United States. To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-eugenics-in-the-usa

Medea was a source of fascination for ancient scholars as early as Hesiod’s Theogony, and yet the early classical sources make no mention of the intentional infanticide that Euripides made an infamous and essential part of the myth. Conversely, authors writing after Euripides bore his iconic tragedy and its infanticide in mind even as they focused on other aspects of the story and characterised Medea differently. In this episode, Shivaike Shah and Professor Jesse Weiner from Hamilton College explore the myths surrounding Medea, from the earliest Greek literature through Roman antiquity and beyond. They consider the many receptions of Medea in modernity: in particular, Joel Barlow’s Columbiad, an early American epic poem that drew upon Medea, Jason and the Argonauts to frame two key moments in the history of American colonisation and independence.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/the-medea-myth

When Professor Curtis Dozier of Vassar College began documenting the appropriation of Greco-Roman antiquity by white supremacist hate groups, he realised that many aspects of the ancient past are, without distortion, congenial to contemporary white ethnonationalism. Indeed, he found that white ethnonationalists often reproduce ideas about Greco-Roman antiquity that have historically enjoyed mainstream currency, particularly where the study of Greco-Roman antiquity was associated with elite culture and politics. In this episode, Professor Dozier speaks to Shivaike Shah about his experiences documenting appropriations of ancient Greece and Rome on his website Pharos: Doing Justice to the Classics. How far are contemporary appropriations of antiquity really ‘abuses’ of the past? And how has the history of Greco-Roman antiquity being used in support of violent, oppressive politics conditioned our own formation as scholars and admirers of the Classics?To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/classics-and-the-modern-alt-right

How might the field of Classics address the unique concerns and questions posed by its students from diverse backgrounds? One valuable way to answer this question is to privilege approaches to the ancient world traditionally eclipsed by literary studies: that is, studying the legacy of ancient works, ideas and associations in other contexts, especially via the study of material culture and classical reception. A complementary approach to the above question is to turn to the classical literary canon itself and consider the potential limits of the texts that are traditionally offered to students as the best of what the ancient world has to offer. It is often by moving outside of these boundaries that students can encounter voices that corroborate their own findings in ancient texts: voices that reject many of the traditional hierarchies still upheld in Classics today and that suggest a classical antiquity already pushing back against its self-valorisation. In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Dr Kathleen Cruz from the University of California at Davis about these very issues.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/khameleon-classics/expanding-the-classical-canon

Classical Greece and Rome have long been intertwined with colonialism. India was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans, and there were extensive trade and cultural contacts between South Asia and the Mediterranean region. When British colonial rule began in India, one of the frames through which Britons viewed the region was that of Greek and Roman antiquity: they imagined themselves following in the footsteps of Alexander the Great or legendary Roman conquerors. In this episode, Shivaike Shah speaks to Professor Phiroze Vasunia from University College London about the rich and fascinating connections between antiquity, Britain and India in the era of modern colonialism. Their discussions range from Macaulay’s ‘Minute’ on Indian education, to Gandhi’s interest in Greek philosophy and the British scholarly obsession with Indian cultures.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/classics-and-the-british-empire-in-india

Is Classics outreach working? Does it meet the concerns of students once they’re at university? Shivaike Shah speaks with Andi Marsh, recent University of Oxford graduate, about her experiences studying Classics as a state-educated Black woman. They discuss how Andi founded the Christian Cole Society to build a community of Classics students of colour and amplify the voices and histories of BIPOC people from the ancient world, as well as within academia; how crucial curriculum reform is for outreach; and how she found working with (and sometimes against) the Oxford Classics Faculty to decolonise Oxford Classics. Heavily involved in access and outreach initiatives as an undergraduate, Andi now works in widening the participation of disproportionately underrepresented students in top UK universities.To find out more about this topic, check out the reading list on our website: https://www.khameleonproductions.org/medeas-performance-history