Sasha-Mae Eccleston
Important Event Update (April 21, 2023): The Glass Lecture has been postponed and will not take place on April 24. More information about when the lecture will be rescheduled will be forthcoming.
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Claremont, Calif. (March 17, 2023)—Internationally renowned classicist Sasha-Mae Eccleston will deliver the 2023 Stephen and Sandra Glass Annual Humanities Lecture on Monday, April 24, at 4 p.m. Her talk, “Mettle, Metal, and Medal, or Autotheorizing Contemporary Classical Scholarship,” will take place in Pitzer College’s Benson Auditorium.
Eccleston’s innovative research, teaching, and organization building not only challenge her field to confront how it has furthered and benefited from racism but also demonstrates the value of thinking simultaneously about critical theories of race and texts from Ancient Greek- and Latin-speaking worlds. Eccleston is the John Rowe Workman Assistant Professor of Classics at Brown University, where she is also affiliated with the Department of Comparative Literature and the Cogut Center’s Initiative for Environmental Humanities.
Eccleston has been creating structures and organizations that support colleagues and students endeavoring to create an anti-racist restructuring of the discipline. She is a co-founder of Eos, the scholarly society dedicated to Africana receptions of Ancient Greek and Roman culture, and served as the society’s inaugural co-president from 2017 to 2020. She also co-founded the international conference series “Racing the Classics” with Dan-El Padilla. She has served on the Society for Classical Studies (SCS) Committee on Diversity in the Profession and on the inaugural steering committee for the first SCS faculty of color caucus.
Eccleston has also been a consulting organizer for Race B4 Race, an ongoing conference series and professional community by and for scholars of color working on issues of race in premodern fields. She is currently coediting with Patrice Rankine a special issue of Transactions of the American Philological Association, one of the oldest and most prestigious journals dedicated to classical philology, titled Race and Racism: Beyond the Spectacular.
Her honors and accolades include but are not limited to a Rhodes Scholarship, the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Rome Prize in Ancient Studies, a Ford Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, and various visiting fellowships.
Eccleston is currently completing her first book, Epic Events, under contract with Yale University Press. Epic Events delves into a heterogeneous archive of contemporary texts (i.e. speeches, films, statues, public art pieces, museums, novels, poetry, and articles) that engage ancient Greek and Roman material to explain the politics of time in the United States. Arguing that American culture treats the ancient Greeks and Romans as both authoritatively ancient and curiously timeless civilizations, the book explains how this paradox facilitates various responses to 9/11’s significance as an epoch-making event.
Pitzer College’s Stephen and Sandra Glass Annual Humanities Lecture showcases leading international figures in the humanities, enriching the cultural life of The Claremont Colleges community. The annual Glass Humanities Lecture is named in honor of John A. McCarthy Professor Emeritus of Classics Stephen L. Glass, one of the Pitzer’s 11 founding faculty members, and his wife, Sandra Glass. It is made possible by the support of Pitzer alumna Nancy Rose Bushnell ’69.
