/lit/ - Literature

>>23095012

this is from Fall 2023 (September 19, 2023)

Prof. John W.I. Lee kicked off the Classics Department’s annual lecture series with “African Americans and Xenophon, c. 1800–1910.”

A noted historian of ancient West Asia and of early African American scholarship, Prof. Lee teaches at the University of California at Santa Barbara and is known for such works as The First Black Archaeologist: A Life of John Wesley Gilbert (Oxford, 2022)

Prof. Lee’s lecture argued that “although Xenophon gets less attention today than Herodotus and Thucydides, his work played a vital role in early African American education.” Analyzing the early curricula of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, he moreover found that Xenophon’s Anabasis was joined only by the Greek New Testament as the primary text for their courses in ancient Greek.

In presenting his research, Lee included case studies of several Black scholars of Xenophon throughout American history, from the Grimké brothers to W.E.B. Du Bois.