This workshop will give participants an opportunity to explore the concepts of internationalization, globalization, cosmopolitanism, and transnationalism in relation to the practice of scholarship in Classics and Ancient Studies. Questions for discussion will include international networks in the history of classical scholarship; the extent to which scholarship still operates within the borders of nation states; the potential influence of border thinking and other postcolonial theories in transforming the intellectual landscape; and the influence of reception studies on the internationalization of classics and ancient studies.

In Classics & Ancient Studies we rightly debate the tendency of the field to operate in favor of Europe, the hegemony of Anglophone scholarship, and the bias towards what the anthropologist Michel Rolph Trouillot called “North Atlantic Universals”. As we both navigate and theorize the internationalization of Classics and Ancient Studies, what can we learn from the history of scholarship and other disciplines like Comparative Literature ? These have long wrestled with the concepts of globalization, transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, and planetarity as a provocation to a more plural, decentered model of the discipline? As Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has said of comparative literature, in spite of the commitment to “world literature” or the “global”, when comparing literatures, there is still a strong tendency for comparison to operate in favor of the European tradition.