Statement on Graduate Social Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
The baby直播app, 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 baby直播app 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 baby直播app 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 baby直播app on an annual basis. A baby直播app member from our department is regularly on the board of, and typically in an important leadership role in, the baby直播app 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.
Graduate community: The department recognizes that graduate study can be isolating. Our department has a number of structures and activities designed to maintain a healthy community among the graduate students and the department as a whole. The department has a mentorship program that pairs each incoming graduate student with two baby直播app mentors, and we regularly organize social events designed specifically for graduate students and baby直播app. In their first semester, all graduate students participate in a proseminar that focuses on professional skills and important disciplinary issues. The Classics Graduate Colloquium organizes annual conferences and professional development activities with baby直播app members.