By Celeste Natera
Classics departments often struggle against the perception that they are stuck in the past. Focusing on ancient stories has nothing to do with us today, right?
Stephen Trzaskoma is a visiting professor in the UCSB Classics Department who focuses on ancient fiction. Photo courtesy of University of New Hampshire.
Visiting professor Stephen Trzaskoma argues otherwise, and his efforts are among the many ways UCSB Classics is engaging with contemporary life.
“We need to acknowledge all the different ways and try to find ways that classics means something. Not as something that's just in the past and dead, but something that you can think with,” Trzaskoma said.
Trzaskoma is a visiting professor from the University of New Hampshire with a specialization in storytelling in the ancient world. Now at UC Santa Barbara, he is teaching a seminar for Classics and English graduate students, hosting workshops within the Classics Department, and helping with the opening of a new interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction.
In a recent interview, Trzaskoma discussed how classics is evolving as a discipline, his experience as a Latino scholar in this field, and his hopes for the future of classics.
Q: What is your main purpose for being here at UCSB?
A: Well, UCSB is actually a great place to be for someone who works on ancient fiction. The Classics Department here has two scholars, Helen Morales and Emilio Capettini, who are opening an interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Ancient Fiction. I’m helping them open the center and I’m also teaching a graduate class for classics and English grad students.
Q: Can you speak a little bit about your experience as a Latino scholar in a primarily white discipline?
A: I'm Mexican American, but people don't know my ethnicity when they look at me. So, the first thing I want to say is that I’ve moved through higher education very differently than others. But I have always been frustrated with classics. Even when I was an undergraduate, it was clear that it was a white discipline, and it doesn't have to be. As with most disciplines in higher education though, it's changing and it's evolving, but it's been frustratingly slow to change and evolve.
Many say that Greek myth is the greatest mythical tradition in the world, and it's true. But there's a real history behind that and we need to acknowledge that and talk about that. It was chosen to be influential. People in Europe chose to make Greek myths influential.
Q: Is there anything you’d like to see change in regard to how classics is taught?
A: When we're teaching classics and Greek myth in particular, we need to acknowledge other mythical traditions. When we're going through the Greek mythical tradition and when the sensitive topics of ethnicity, sexual violence, skin color, or slavery comes up, it needs to be interrogated. More people are discussing these topics now, but I want people to be doing it more regularly. The question too, is whether we have time to figure all these questions out and have a classics that comes out of this that is open to all these really important questions and with a very different way of presenting itself.
Q: Would you say that these discussions within the Classics Department are representative of current social and political issues?
A: Absolutely. Professor Helen Morales, here at UCSB, taught a graduate seminar a couple of years back on social justice and classics. Many classics scholars are engaged in things like that. There is often this notion that “we” are the Greeks and Romans, “we” are their descendants. But I’m Mexican American. I have dramatically different experiences of life and the world. We all do. So, we have to unpack that “we.” We ask questions of what is justice in our world? What is equity in our world? What is decency in our world? How should we live our lives? If classics can't say things to all of us, then maybe they're irrelevant. But I don't think they are. I'm optimistic because I have found a lot of things to think about within the classics. I have found it useful to think about ancient democracy and modern American politics. I have thought it useful in any number of ways. Now we need to make sure that that's part of what we view as our mission.
Celeste Natera is a third-year UC Santa Barbara sociology major. She conducted this interview for her Writing Program class, Journalism for Web and Social Media.