Future of the Past Lab

Freedom has a long intellectual history in the West, and it is obviously one of the core values that we hold in American culture, amplified by the upcoming 250th anniversary of our founding as a nation. Freedom, indeed, has been thought of as the sole possession of the Western intellectual and democratic traditions, originally tracing its roots back to Greece and Rome. Our guest in this episode, Jake Nabel, the Tombros Early Career Professor of Classical Studies and Assistant Professor of Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies at Penn State University, has a different story to tell about freedom. While Prof. Nabel recognizes the Greek and Roman traditions of freedom, he argues that freedom also has a long history in ancient Iran, one that parallels and intersects the intellectual development of freedom in Greece and Rome. Prof Nabel and I have a lively conversation about freedom and its intellectual ancestors and even delve into the ways studying the cultures of ancient Iran can help nuance our understanding of this region today.

Politics and art can have an interesting and sometimes fraught relationship with each other. Poets can participate in presidential inaugurations, as has been seen in recent years in the United States, and their role there has been to celebrate the new president and to potentially challenge him to live up the ideals of America. American songwriters have a history of being more pointed in their critique of political leadership than poets. In ancient Rome and India, sometimes this relationship can be more complicated, especially when it comes to epic poetry. Our guest today, Shubha Pathak, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at American University, explores the religious and political dynamics of Indian and Roman epic love poetry in antiquity. Unlike in modern Western cultures, religion and politics in ancient India and Rome are not separate, so these dynamics can point to the profound effects of ancient literary art on the upper echelons of ancient culture.

Studying the past begins with archives, those places where artifacts are gathered, stored, and preserved. Archives of manuscripts, in particular, have stories of their own and often shape the way we understand the past just by the nature of their origins and how they have survived through the ages. Although major collections are now held in museums and preserved by professionals, a century or more ago, it was common for wealthy Western individuals to amass collections of antiquities as prizes of their international exploits. Their acquisitions and archives remain today but have a thick layer of colonialism that must be considered. There were also non-Western individuals that tried to create collections to keep manuscripts in their place of origin and to preserve local cultural heritage. Two collectors, Claudius Rich—a wealthy early 19th century British orientalist, and Louis Cheikho, a late 19th century Turkish Jesuit priest in Lebanon—had contrasting interests and motivations for amassing their collections of ancient Syriac manuscripts. Our guest today Maroun El Houkayem will share the insights of his fascinating work on these two men and the ethical issues their archives raise for how we study antiquity.

Classical archaeology has traditionally focused on the big finds—monumental buildings, temples, statuary, and villas. These finds are dramatic and have created some of the most famous elements of the landscape of classical Greece and Rome. But they also give a skewed vision of the ancient world because the big finds only represent a small sliver of ancient life—that of the elite populations and oftentimes those who have colonized regions distant from their own. Peter van Dommelen, professor of archaeology at Brown University, has spent his career searching for evidence of the rest of the population. By focusing on rural life and agricultural practices, he has begun to uncover the other side of ancient societies, the colonized rather than the colonizers. By focusing on the majority, non-elite, and rural populations, Prof. Dommelen has been able to glimpse indigenous populations in Sardinia at different time periods and thus reconceptualize the ancient world of colonization of the island. By looking through a much more complex, kaleidoscope lens, his work helps to fill out the way we understand the ancient landscape beyond the large monuments.Visit Future of the Past Lab to learn about our work, and to support this podcast, visit Future of the Past Lab Podcasts and click on the support button.

Classical philology is not usually considered a font of social change, with its very detailed and rigorous look at the language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. But our guest for this episode sees tremendous potential precisely in the careful work of philology to give us new avenues of civic engagement and social change both in Africa and in the United States. David van Schoor, a classicist from South Africa now teaching at Emory University, draws upon his wide and varied experiences both inside and outside academia to discuss what he calls Liberation Philology, the process of rediscovering the great works of classical antiquity, including the Bible, through deep engagement in the language of these works. This type of engagement can help us to free our minds to see our divided political and social with new lenses that have the potential to break us free from our stalemates and renew civic and social relations.Visit Future of the Past Lab to learn about our work, and to support this podcast, visit Future of the Past Lab Podcasts and click on the support button.

The Book of Revelation and other ancient apocalypses portray visions and prophecies that spoke to the moment of their times. The language and imagery depict the divine power that promises to deliver audiences from the powerful, often imperial, oppression that they endured. These apocalypses are both violent and hopeful—violent for the oppressors and hopeful for the oppressed. Our guest today, Harvard Divinity School professor Giovanni Bazzana, helps us to understand this dynamic at a deeper level, but he also discusses later activations of apocalypses, including those of today. What happens to this complex ancient literature? Do the oppressed become the oppressors, and do the powerful convince themselves that they are persecuted? And what is lost over the ages when we see the spectacle and theatricality of apocalyptic imagery in popular culture? Professor Bazzana unpacks this rich cultural dynamic, and also muses about the place of spirit possession in the study of ancient Christianity.Visit Future of the Past Lab to learn about our work, and to support this podcast, visit Future of the Past Lab Podcasts and click on the support button.

Ancient Egypt continues to fascinate, as it has for hundreds of years now. Museums hold pride of place when it comes to the mechanism by which many people encounter ancient Egypt, whether it be through modern art that uses Egyptian motifs or by the careful display of actual artifacts from ancient Egypt for museum-goers to encounter. Exhibitions featuring Egyptian artifacts are often the gem of ancient museum collections, but the curation and exhibition of these artifacts are contested spaces, often created to shape the experience of museum-goers in subtle ways. With a PhD in art history and an MFA in curation, our guest, Dr. Rachel Kreiter from Vanderbilt University Museum, helps us unpack the curation and exhibition of ancient Egyptian art and artifacts in museums. Dr. Kreiter helps us to understand the sometimes subtle, sometimes provocative exhibition of ancient Egyptian art in museums, how we might distinguish between art objects and religious objects, and why understanding ancient art history matters when it comes to creating museum exhibitions.Visit Future of the Past Lab to learn about our work, and to support this podcast, visit Future of the Past Lab Podcasts and click on the support button.

In the past 10 years, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a social concept has risen to the highest levels of institutionalization under the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as in higher education and corporate settings. It has been seen as a crucial corrective to the long history of institutional racism that has plagued our country from even before its founding. DEI has also been raised up by political and cultural conservatives as the central target of their efforts to wage a culture war against liberal “wokeness” in order to preserve the traditional history and culture of the United States. Understanding what constitutes “Diversity” and “Inclusion” seems fairly straightforward, but what about “Equity”? In this episode of The Future of the Past Lab, we talk with Dr. Charles McNamara from the University of Minnesota whose new book, Learning to Be Fair explores the concept of “Equity” from classical philosophy to contemporary politics. We discover the surprising fluidity of this concept through the ages and how key figures in our country’s history grappled with the legal and cultural weight of Equity long before it became a buzzword in out contemporary culture wars.Visit Future of the Past Lab to learn about our work, and to support this podcast, visit Future of the Past Lab Podcasts and click on the support button.

When the eras of history are re-examined from multiple perspectives, we can begin to see that the boundaries of eras, not to mention the generally accepted names of them, are not so clear. Today, we are talking with Young Kim from the University of Illinois Chicago whose work examines Cyprus of the fifth and sixth centuries as a case study in the transition from so-called Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Is the line between these eras so clear as once thought? How does the examination of events of this time and place from different perspectives affect our understanding of the transition to the Middle Ages? Was this transition even a transition or can we characterize this time period more accurately by looking at the evidence differently? Dr. Kim will help us explore these questions for Cyprus but also help us interrogate more widely the ways that the past is reconstructed in all eras. Visit futureofthepastlab.com for information about our program, our blog and links to future and past events.Visit Future of the Past Lab to learn about our work, and to support this podcast, visit Future of the Past Lab Podcasts and click on the support button.

A conversation with Anna Rosensweig from the University of Rochester who shares with us her latest work on how Christian Nationalists and QAnon conspiracists in the US are currently mobilizing texts, images, and ideas from the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion in France. Visit futureofthepastlab.com for information about our program, our blog and links to future and past events. To support this podcast, visit Future of the Past Lab Podcasts and click on the support button.