Statement on Graduate Social Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

The faculty, staff, and students of CU Classics are committed to fostering an inclusive environment in which to study the literature and culture of the ancient world. This commitment informs our pedagogy, scholarship, and engagement with our community. The ancient Mediterranean was a diverse place, home to a huge variety of cultures, languages, and ethnicities; we embrace that diversity and hope to make our department, as well as the field as a whole, a welcoming and equitable environment for every student.

Pedagogy: Our faculty work hard to show students the full diversity of the ancient Mediterranean, and to demonstrate how we can use antiquity to better understand our own time. We offer courses on ancient race and ethnicity, slavery, sex and gender in both Greece and Rome, ancient Egypt, the ancient Near East, and cross-cultural interactions throughout the ancient Mediterranean. Our courses also highlight the experiences of members of underprivileged groups, and of people whose experiences were not preserved in literary records. We teach our students to look for colonized voices in the Athenian and Roman empires, to consider the violence committed by those regimes, and to bring that same curiosity and open-mindedness to their engagements with the modern world.

Scholarship: We embrace a wide variety of scholarly approaches to the ancient Mediterranean, with a particular focus on non-elites. Our department employs social historians of both Mycenaean and Classical Greece, and is one of relatively few Classics departments to include the study of Achaemenid Persia. We are passionate about training the next generation of scholars to look beyond elite male viewpoints to the full scope of experiences that made up the ancient world, including those of women and minoritized groups.

Community Engagement: The department sponsors a number of free lectures aimed at the general public and offers a number of different free programs aimed at students in local public schools. Once a week our faculty and students teach at Casey Middle School, helping students develop literacy skills while also exposing them to Classical languages and culture; we also offer a day of free programming for middle- and high-school students throughout Colorado on an annual basis. A faculty member from our department is regularly on the board of, and typically in an important leadership role in, the Colorado Classics Association, which is the state-wide organization of and for teachers and friends of Classics. We take our mission as a public university seriously, and share our research and teaching with the communities we serve.