Join the CMS Mobilities Research Group and UBC Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies for “White Columns on Turtle’s Back: Classics, Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory Here and Now” with Dr. Katherine Blouin.
Abstract
In this talk, Dr. Blouin will discuss what it means to do Classics right now on what many Indigenous Nations call Turtle Island. She will do so by sharing some of the things she has (un)learned while co-editing the 2024 Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Postcolonial Theory, and by reflecting on what moral and public paths currently offer themselves to Classics and Antiquity fields practitioners.
Dr. Katherine Blouin has a PhD in Roman History from the Université Laval (Québec City, Canada) and the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis (Nice, France), and a Postdoctoral Diploma in Greek Papyrology from the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Paris, France). Her work centres on socio-economic and environmental history, with a focus on ancient, and particularly Roman, Egypt, as well as on the ethics and (de)colonial entailments of Antiquity-related fields. She has written about the Judaeo-Alexandrian conflict, the environmental history of the Nile Delta, multiculturalism, cultural and religious identities, as well as Lands, (non)-Human beings, and periods that are commonly considered to be ‘marginal’.
Dr. Blouin has also worked on the cataloging, restoration, and digitization of the Greek papyrus collection in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and have edited Greek documents on papyri and leather from that collection, as well as from the Franco-Italian mission at Tebtunis. Her current work focuses on the ways in which imperialism and Orientalism have impacted (and are still impacting) the fields of Classics, Papyrology, and Egyptology, and how these entanglements manifest themselves in (settler) colonial contexts.
She is a co-founder and editor of Everyday Orientalism, as well as the editor of the volume The Nile Delta: Histories from Antiquity to the Modern Period (Cambridge, 2024) and the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Classics, Colonialism, and Potscolonial Theory (with Ben Akrigg, London, forthcoming in 2025) and Viva Palestina: Imagining Transhistorical Solidarity (with Usama Ali Gad, Mathura Umachandran and Marchella Ward, in preparation). Lastly, she is working on a book project entitled Inventing Alexandria, which explores the history, historiography, and reception of pre- to early Hellenistic Alexandria.
This event is co-organized by the CMS Mobilities Research Group and the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at UBC.
