Downing Fellow leading international Classics project
Downing Fellow, Dr Frisbee Sheffield, is leading an international Classics project Classics Beyond Borders, which is supported by the Cambridge Africa Alborada Research Fund and the Leventis Foundation.
The project is motivated by a desire to re-contextualise the study of Classics in a global perspective that rejects the common notion that the ancient Greek and Roman worlds are the special preserve of European and Western academia. Classics is thriving in some universities in Africa and these scholars need to be included in the scholarly conversation to ensure the increasing vitality of the subject.
Establishing collaborative links with universities across the world, particularly in countries that were formerly under British rule, forms a crucial part of attempts to reclaim Classics as an academic discipline from its colonial legacy and ensure that the discipline thrives as a more diverse and inclusive scholarly endeavour.
The first collaboration has been with Classicists and Philosophers at the University of Ghana. Ghana remains the only country in West Africa where Classics is studied in two public universities (the University of Ghana since 1948, and the University of Cape Coast since 1963), and scholars there have been at the forefront of decolonising the discipline of Classics.
The collaboration has focused on three areas so far. First - since Classical languages remain one of the biggest barriers for African students seeking admission into UK graduate programs - to provide online teaching provision in Greek and Latin, to support the re-introduction of Latin and Greek at the University of Ghana (twice-weekly classes via Zoom). Work has now begun on a new translation project with Ghanaian students to foster a sense of agency and inclusion in the reading of Classical texts.
Second, Classics Beyond Borders has supported the work of Dr Stephen Oppong Peprah who is researching an unduly marginalised Ghanaian philosopher (a former enslaved person) who wrote philosophical treatises in Latin: Anton Wilhelm Amo (c. 1703-1759). Amo is believed to have been the first African to study in a modern European University after he was taken as a boy from West Africa to Amsterdam. The project has also supported another visiting scholar from Ghana, Michael Asante, who delivered a lecture in the Faculty of Classics this year, “Decolonising Classics: Lessons from Africa” in April.
Finally, at the heart of the collaboration is a research project focused on a topic of shared interest for researchers in Cambridge and in Ghana: Plato on community.
After a set of joint seminars exploring Plato on community, all project partners participated in the largest annual UK Classics conference, the Classical Association (April 2023).
In September, scholars and a graduate student from Cambridge travelled to Ghana as part of a flagship conference to mark the end of the first year of the collaboration and met scholars from Nigeria, Malawi and Uganda. The hope is to extend the Classics Beyond Borders collaboration to other Universities across Africa.
"I have learnt so much from this collaboration already. Fostering a more inclusive dialogue is part of shattering an exclusionary narrative that Classics is a Eurocentric discipline, which we need to encourage a more diverse student body into the subject," said Dr Sheffield.
"Since Classics had to justify its place in post-colonial Ghana, for example, this has led to a body of work which emphasises the continued relevance of Classics as a discipline. This has injected a vitality and dynamism into the reading of works such as Plato’s Republic, for example, and it may drive increased interest in the subject from non-Classicists (as it has done in Ghana), in accordance with our own widening participation aims.
"Learning from scholars beyond Europe and America provides an opportunity to consider more consciously the social and historical embeddedness of our own work and expose the contingency of our own readings. This promises to expand and critique our own perspectives and exclusions in new and interesting ways."
Dr Sheffield will be giving a presentation about the project with Stephen Oppong Peprah at Downing College on 18 June 2024 as part of the Cambridge Africa Day.
Published 28 November 2023