Roman Diversity and the Classical Archive: Nine Muses of Critical Fabulation

An HRC Work in Progress Morning Tea

Roman Diversity and the Classical Archive: Nine Muses of Critical Fabulation

We’ve all heard about the nine Muses: the daughters of Memory (Mnemosyne) and Power (Zeus, the king of the gods) who preside over ancient Greco-Roman literature, from epic to tragedy to history.

But what of all the women forgotten by history and other elite genres, people without socioeconomic or political clout who nevertheless played essential roles in building the worlds, livelihoods, and imaginative landscapes that sustain our Greco-Roman archive and the discipline of “classics”?

Via “nine muses of forgetting,” this experimental talk surveys and welcomes your input in evidential and methodological challenges and hopes of retelling ancient Mediterranean stories from below, re-centering dominant narratives from marginalized perspectives, and honoring diverse voices that rarely speak for themselves within our literary and archaeological record.

Speaker: 
Dr Nandini Pandey is Associate Professor of Classics at John Hopkins University. Dr Pandey comes to the ANU as the 2024 HRC-Centre for Classical Studies Fellow.