Featured Scholar: December 2024

 

Dr. Caroline Bishop (Associate Professor, Department of Classical and Modern Languages and Literatures)

What are you watching/streaming?

I’m currently catching up on Hacks, which is both a funny and surprisingly moving show about a hacky comedienne (Jean Smart) trying to reinvent herself with the help of a hapless young comedy writer (Hannah Einbinder, daughter of Laraine Newman).  The show doesn’t put too fine a point on it, but I really enjoy the exploration of how two women of different generations interact with each other: Einbinder’s character has so many more opportunities than Smart’s did, yet she still finds herself held back because she doesn’t conform to the roles that society expects of women. The show was created and is written by several of the people responsible for Broad City, which is another great comedy about women’s lived experiences.

What games are you playing?

I have a three-and-a-half-year-old who is just learning about the concept of game play, so the only game I play these days is a matching game called “Never Play Bingo with a Tiger”

What are you listening to?

Right now, I’m finishing the audiobook version of Julie Schumacher’s Dear Committee Members, a satire of higher education that takes place through the medium of letters of recommendation. The narrator is an irritable professor of creative writing named Jason Fitger, and the baritone-voiced Robertson Dean reads his letters with the perfect put-upon cadence. 

What are you reading?

I recently read Lauren Groff’s short novel The Vaster Wilds, which tells the story of a teenaged servant girl who escapes from the Jamestown colony during the “starving time” of winter 1609 and travels through the surrounding countryside in a last-ditch attempt at survival. It’s beautifully written and a very compelling read about the human will to survive and the endurance that forces us to keep going.

What are you writing/thinking about?

I am working right now on my second book project, Cicero Among Roman and Greek Readers. Cicero, a Roman politician and author who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar, is one of the most canonical figures from the classical world. My book explores his reception among later Romans and Greeks in order to demonstrate how he was transformed from a problematic politician into a timeless classic. The larger aim is to interrogate the concept of classicism as an ideology and to show that the roots of the discipline known as “classics” stretch back to the so-called classical world itself. For a long time, our discipline uncritically adopted ancient attitudes towards the authors that we study, and I hope that my book offers a salutary reminder that we must unlearn these postures in order to approach the cultures that we study with a more balanced eye.