2025 Conference Objects and Essays

Foreword: Annual Meeting of Postgraduates in the Reception of the Ancient World

Ianni, Emma; Spacciante, Valeria

Built in Neoclassical style in 1934, Columbia University’s Butler Library is emblematic of a common association of Greco-Roman antiquity with elite culture and privileged knowledge: engraved on the frieze of the main façade are the names “Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Vergil.” In October 2019, Columbia students (supported by the university Libraries) unfurled a new banner bearing the names of eight female and transgender writers above the original inscriptions.

We begin the introduction to this volume with this anecdote because we see a profound affinity of intent between the 2019 “Butler Banner Project” and the papers collected here: to decenter Greco-Roman antiquity, in an effort to reflect on the role it has played in creating harmful and exclusive ideology. Recent work in the field has focused on acknowledging and dismantling elitist and exclusionary legacies associated with the Greco-Roman world , as well as renegotiating the role of the classicist vis-à-vis the power structures which classical antiquity contributed to creating . We thus picked the theme “Center & Periphery” to reflect the tremendous paradigm shift which our discipline is undergoing.