Good practice – learning and teaching: diversifying the curriculum
School of Classics
Although material that could help diversify the curriculum is ostensibly relatively sparse and, we can safely assume, was all composed by men anyway, in CL4455 ‘Roman Praise’ for 2018-19, I introduced a (2 hour) seminar on ‘gendered praise’.
The material I selected for analysis included funerary inscriptions (epitaphs) of a few women (about whom we know very little else); a Greek panegyric addressed to an emperor’s wife; and fleeting references in a Latin panegyric to some female members of the imperial family. This evidence generated discussion of the quantitative imbalance between formal praise of females and males in the ancient record; and qualitatively, we discussed what females were praised for and how that compared with what males were praised for. As well as the prescribed material, this discussion drew on students’ wider knowledge of gender stereotyping in classical antiquity, and moved to the normative power of formal rhetoric. From this, discussion moved to identifying models of masculinity upheld in other examples of Roman praise that we had already encountered in the module. Discussion was animated!
For further information, please contact Prof. Roger Rees on [email protected].