Executive Summary

This Project develops a new interdisciplinary module that addresses the considerable, but too often overlooked, contribution of Africa and people of African descent to western classical literature and culture and its reception. The module will be available for the first time in 2018-2019 and in future years to students of Classics, English, History, Italian and Liberal Arts. Students will analyse and question the portrayal of Africa and African people in Western classical literature, become acquainted with Greek and Latin literary works of ancient African authors and authors writing in Africa, and reflect upon the effects that preconceptions and assumptions about the Graeco-Roman heritage have on the engagement with classical literature by contemporary authors of African descent, both in Africa and in the Western World: httos://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/classics/students/modules/africa

The module promotes interdisciplinarity, internationalization, inclusiveness and diversity within the discipline of Classics. It contributes to a wider innovative trend of renovation of the discipline that is taking place mostly in the US departments, and it ties in with past research activities of the Warwick Classics Department (such as the international African Athena conference, 2009). It addresses issues related to diversity and inclusiveness for current and prospective undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts, as part of a strategic action reflected in our ITLR.

The IATL Academic Fellowship that I am applying for (£7,050) would allow me to open up the module to interdisciplinary and international dialogue by inviting speakers to contribute to its offer by delivering lectures and/or workshops on critical aspects of the module related to critical race theory and pedagogy. This will allow the students to be taught by national and international experts in the interdisciplinary themes of the module and to re-balance and address the urgent issue of the underrepresentation of authors and scholars of African descent in current classical studies, especially in the UK. The lectures will be filmed by lecture capture in order to be made available to students taking the module in future years.