Hello and welcome to Regional Classics, a podcast from the University of Oxford,
which reflects and celebrates the diverse voices of Oxford classicists past and present from different parts of the UK.
All the while creating thought provoking conversations,
breaking down barriers and showing that if you want to study the world any aspect politics, history,
art, science, literature, culture and much more than you can box of classicists do not and need not come from only a narrow cross-section of society.
In this episode, I'm thrilled to be joined by Bertie Thompson,
a Classics alumna of St Hilda's College and now VP of Product Communications at Facebook.
Alexander Moore, a postgraduate in ancient history at Lady Margaret Hall, where he researches the late Roman Republic,
and by Ellie Newman an archaeology doctoral student at Somerville College, where she investigates the treatment of black women in Hellenistic art.
They all originally hail from the Midlands in England. And Bertie, can I come to you first and just ask, whereabouts did you grow up?
And can you remember when you first became aware of the study of the ancient world?
Yeah, of course. Thanks so much for having me. So excited for this conversation.
so I was born in Birmingham and raised in Wolverhampton and spent the first 18 years of my life there.
My earliest memories of Classics really stem from my childhood.
And just hearing Aesop's Fables, my dad was always really passionate about the ancient world.
I grew up watching such classic movies as Clash of the Titans and Spartacus.
So it wasn't something where I had a flash of light or a moment where I suddenly discovered classics.
It was always sort of a baseline in growing up much like kind of Star Trek and sci fi.
So some of my earliest memories. Thank you -how about you, Alexander, thank you as well for having me here.
This is a great opportunity to talk about the Midlands perspective on classics.
And I think that's the way I got into this, rather similar to Bertie.
I was for as long as I can remember as a child, you know, the ancient world is always something that is naturally drew me.
Everything, video games, TV, media books. You know, I was absolutely engrossed in anything and everything that was just sort of ancient Rome.
And that sort of dictated everything that I did in terms of sort of, as I say, popular media.
So, yeah, it was always a very natural progression for men no singular moment that I could ever point to.
But there were definitely key influences. I remember. So like certain TV shows or video games,
I played as a kid that just stuck with me all my life. And where about exactly in the Midlands where you growing up.
So I'm from Burton on Trent, which is a sort of a small industrial town.
It's, I guess the closest cities are Derby. And Ellie. Hi, thanks so much for having me.
So I grew up in a small town called Nuneaton, which is between Coventry and Birmingham.
It's a very, very small town. Not many people have heard of it, but I actually had a bit of a different experience with classics.
It actually stemmed from getting fed up of studying modern history at school.
And that was a course on offer at college to study an A-level in ancient history.
And my mum was like, oh, you realise that that's going to be like all the old myths and all of that.
And I was like, Oh, that sounds so cool. I want to do that. And so that's really the first thing I remember, obviously.
I mean, I watched things like Doctor Who, which had travel into the ancient world and Disney's Hercules and that sort of thing.
But that was like the defining moment for me where I really realised it was actually a thing that you could study.
Yeah. And it's fantastic that you got that chance to do ancient history as a an A level, because it's quite unusual,
not that widely studied throughout the country, but also in the Midlands in particular.
I know there's been research done in 2021 that shows how few opportunities there are, it's been called classics,
poverty within the whole of the Midlands region, particularly in the East Midlands.
So I'm interested to hear what your perspectives are on that, how that situation can potentially be changed.
And if you're a young student today who is unable to access a classical subject at school, what advice would you say or give to them?
I can play a little bit of what Ellie said, because for me, I also was very lucky to find an a level,
course, that was of great interest at my school, which was classical civilisations.
so half ancient history and half literature in translation. And it was pretty random.
I was a non fee paying grammar school and no ancient Greek was on offer and Latin for me, actually clashed with music.
The lesson timings. So music was my first love.
So really it was only the kind of literature in translation and Class Civ that gave me the ability to actually study classics.
So I just think being able to offer subjects that give students a choice of what they can study.
And I had actually started off doing an English literature a level and after the first few weeks, I was like, this is just not for me too recent!
I don't know what it was and being able to switch was really instrumental in obviously driving my whole course of study and life and career as well.
So I think just having the ability to have a broad range of subjects to choose from is incredibly critical.
I'd just like to add to that because I actually didn't have any formal sort of experience in education.
There was no option at all. I was from a sort of non-selective state school and there was there was no GCSE, no A level that
was available. And in fact, it took me a very,
very long time to actually realise that classics was more than essentially just as genre of history that I was particularly interested in.
And it was actually a discipline. That was a lesson that I had to learn the hard way.
And I distinctly remember being sort of at the end of my GCSE and picking my A-levels,
and my school didn't exactly have a lot of variety or a lot of choice.
And one of my my English literature teacher at the time said to me, we could do an A level in classics.
And I was like 'what's that' and when she told me I was like, this is exactly everything I need and want to do.
But it was just something that my school were just completely not interested in at all.
And, you know, they shut us down rather quickly.
But I was still fortunate enough, actually, that I had a very supportive teacher and I kind of gained a reputation for myself in English.
Literature as the guy that always brought up classical myths, even when they were not exactly that relevant, as I might have advocated.
And so my sort of experience with that was that I was not even aware that there were such things as a level classical civ.
And so I remember I was in undergrad and people told me today there was an a level in that and I'm so jealous.
How how did you get to do an a level in that?!
So the only experience I had was that I had a teacher who was kind of she was a classics grad and she taught me sort of Latin informally now.
But again, it was it wasn't anything that I thought that was serious. It was to me, it was all part of the fun of ancient history and classics.
And I thought, wow, this is this is a great book. This is actually a degree that I can do.
And it took me a long time to realise that just because, you know, we didn't have that formal sort of introduction at GCSE or even a level.
And I think that when it comes to sort of outreach for me, that's so key, because we live in sort of this digital world dominated by media,
where you have things like, know, Assassin's Creed, Odyssey just recently blown up about Greece and anyone can get into that.
It doesn't matter where you're from. Everyone can get into that. But I personally think that for someone in my school,
I had all the passion or the desire for ancient history, but that kind of is only one half of the coin.
You know, you need the A-levels as well. And it just really, you know, to that passion.
And I was kind of lucky that I had a teacher who spotted that within me and encouraged me to follow that passion.
But, you know, not everyone is that fortunate. And it took me a long time to realise that classics was even a discipline that I could actually do at university.
So I think it's just very important on a fundamental level that we have something built into the education system itself.
Yeah, see, that's very interesting because even though I did so, I went to an absolutely massive.
It was a state college, so it wasn't selective or anything like that.
It was just so big that it had so many subjects. It had literally every subject that you could think of.
It had archaeology a level when I was there
But it's interesting what you're saying Alex about the balance between having
the passion within yourself and also having someone to sort of nurture that,
So I think, as you're saying, it's sort of so important to have people within schools,
within colleges who want people to study the subject rather than just sort of
from stumbling upon it in university prospectuses or from somebody saying,
oh, you realise that you can study this. You know, it needs to be sort of within within schools.
Can we talk more about outreach? Because I feel like we all have these sort of pivotal people who've helped us kind
of become more interesting or interested or realised that there's a path of study.
I think for me, we actually had a visit from Dr Bowie from Queens while I was doing my A-levels,
and he came to our school and had lunch with the six of us who were during the course.
And Oxford would not have been on my radar at all. Absolutely.
Were it not for that one visit. And so it really was kind of a pivotal moment for me that really kind of changed
the course of things and would just like to kind of discuss a bit more.
I'm obviously many years out of Oxford now. And also I've been living in the US for the last 11 years.
And so I'm less close to what the outreach work looks like now.
I know at the time there was a lot of great work happening.
And the issue that I find actually was I tried to do some outreach with local colleges and schools and was told by one,
oh, our school's not interested in Oxford. There's no point in you even coming, which I just find really depressing.
So I would just love to hear more from you all that is possibly more recent.
there are so many initiatives going on which we find on our website things like the classical conversations,
particularly in light of the pandemic whereby Oxford tutors will do a half an hour question and
answer session with a group of students on any topic that the students would like to learn about,
whether it's related to their courses or it's something completely different, something that they're interested in.
There's also a range of classics competitions available to students, but I'd be interested to hear from Alexander and Ellie as well,
kind of seeing it slightly more recently from from the other side of the different ways that Oxford can reach students and also,
I suppose, outreach more generally across across the UK. Yes, I'm happy to to talk about that.
I'm at the moment currently, I'm just a first year DPhil.
So at the moment, my experience of graduate like Oxford has been very much sort of dictated by the pandemic.
So as much as outreach is something I would love to be involved in, unfortunately, it's not something that I have for any first hand experience.
But I definitely think that there are certain strategies, you know, that you can employ specifically.
You know, you think of the Midlands I remember actually studying at Oxford is not something that was ever a consideration at my secondary school.
It was not something that we were ever even, you know, anyone never thought of doing.
And I just don't remember. In fact, my school did take a couple of students, a select few and sort of not so much an open day.
This is a trip to Oxford just to see it. And I'm not quite sure that the purpose of that was no.
I look back in hindsight because we weren't exactly being encouraged to apply to Oxford.
It was just sort of an acknowledgement that this board existed and that maybe one day you might end of that.
And I think that that's a barrier that we have to work better at dispelling.
And one way of doing that is rather than what my school did, which they took a trip,
that is I really like what you were saying about actually having you know, there was a doctor who came in and actually spoke to students about it.
I think that's that's incredible. And that's not something that, in my experience, I would have loved.
That would be something that I would absolutely have been amazed by in secondary school, not only because I would have enjoyed the topic,
but again, it would have just reinforced to me something that I didn't know back then, which is just that is a discipline.
You know, it's something you can study at university.
And, you know, that's something that I think can go a long way in encouraging people not just to study Oxford,
but just to study classics generally, which I think is very important.
But definitely I think that there's a lot that we can do to sort of dispel myths, sort of surrounding, you know, applying to Oxford,
because so many people just look at that as just this impenetrable hurdle that's not even worth trying to topple.
And that, to me, I think that doesn't quite make a lot of sense.
Instead of building it up is something that we can't or shouldn't do, which is, I think,
the approach that my school took it it needs to be a bit, you know, encouraged perhaps a bit more.
Yeah, I think having people go to different schools is a really good idea.
Again, I went to a school that it just wasn't it wasn't a thing I think I know of.
My entire time at college, there were three people that got into Oxbridge and there were thousands of us.
But I think as well, it's so important in these outreach programmes to have people who you can relate to.
So, you know, people like us who students can hear come from a similar sort of background,
a similar place to just know that it is an option for people who come from our sorts of backgrounds,
come from even like location wise people who don't come from Oxford, London.
That sort of area, people who come from the Midlands, the north, the southwest.
Like all of this. I think that I think that it's so important and it would encourage more people to think, do you know what, I think that I can do this.
I think that it's somewhere that I want to be as well.
Because you think of Oxford classics and you think of a certain group of people that I personally wouldn't feel like I belong to, you know?
So I think while outreach is so important to get people interested in the subject,
it's also to help people think it's not as exclusive as it once was.
And something as well, I'd just like to add to that is that I think it's very important that we think that we have to be relatable to people.
And it's something that I think would have really benefited me at the time. As I say, it just was not an option in my school.
And in turn, that meant that Latin and Greek again, it took me a very long time before I realised,
of course, I was fortunate enough that I had this dedicated teacher who was teaching me.
very informally at those times. But it was never something I thought that was serious.
And this is something that is still to this day, I feel like impacts me.
The fact that I never had Latin at school, the fact that I was never able to study these languages, whereas I think that,
again, that's something that we need to work on so that you don't have to study these languages to do classics.
Of course, I should say you don't have to study them in secondary school to do classics.
You can still take these languages up at university. It's not too late.
And this was something this is a fear that I had when I was sort of discovering the field and entering the field.
And I thought, oh, gosh, everyone else is doing A-levels in classical civ and Latin.
And this is the first time I've been hearing about this. And it really affected sort of my confidence going in.
And I think that, again, if someone had come to me in secondary school and said, you can absolutely go and do an undergraduate degree in classics,
pick up a language, then, you know, I think that would go a long way in terms of being relatable.
And that really resonates to me, I had not done Latin or greek before and so took them both up as part of my undergrad course to be.
And there were four of us, I think, in the whole class who were doing the course to be.
And I think you're right. Right. It's great just for people to understand that it's something you can take up later.
And one of the things that I just love most about the field of study in classics is that it just encompasses so many different things.
I already knew that I loved languages. I had actually studied Russian strangely at my school.
The school had just this random history of teaching Russian and i knew i loved literature and then was able to
combine with all of these other kind of exciting areas of study and the paper on Greek vases,
which I love to this day. So, yeah, it's incredible.
And Ellie, just hearing about it really reminded me and took me back to my interview time at Oxford because,
again, you know, there was this like black girl from Wolverhampton sitting at dinner and like a big,
fabulous, scary looking hall with a group of very wonderful public schoolboys,
one of whom kind of said he'd been studying Greek and Latin since he was eight or nine.
The other one, he proclaimed at dinner that he could recite the entire first chapter of the Aeneid in Latin.
And I was like, wow, what is this world? And of course, they subsequently went on to be great friends, very wonderful people.
But it really was just like being plopped into a totally different world.
Yeah, I think this languages thing is also something that it's an obstacle that people who study other subjects don't necessarily have to face.
I didn't have the chance to do Greek or Latin at all in school.
We barely did modern languages. And then so when I came to so I actually did my undergrad at Nottingham.
And when I came to Nottingham, I not only one of my first lectures was on the Iliad,
which I'd never heard of in my life, but also because I felt like I needed to have a language.
And I was told by my tutors that I needed to have an ancient language in order to carry on with classics as far as I have.
I decided to take up beginner's Latin, during my first term,
and then in the second term I had to choose between doing beginners Latin again or doing Greek and Roman mythology,
which obviously kids who have already studied ancient languages. This isn't something that they have to decide between.
They just do Greek mythology, which I found ten times more interesting.
So I ended up deciding to do that instead. So I think universities need to be prepared for students who have never had the opportunity before.
Yeah, it's interesting that when you're saying that really sort of resonated with me as well.
I actually did my undergraduate degree in dual honours in modern history and history.
The reason being that, you know, when I was at secondary school again, I was still as much as I knew that I wanted to do ancient history.
And that was the interested I was completely unaware that it was even a valid discipline for so long.
You know, I saw in prospectuses and I went on open days and whenever I spoke to my teachers about it,
they would all said the same thing to me, which was you sure about that? stick to modern history?
You know, that that's viable.
And so in the end, ultimately, the way I sort of pick my modules, my credits, was that it was very much an ancient history degree by the end of it.
But it definitely meant that I had the exact same choices to make.
I came in I remember my first year at Liverpool, and I came in in my first year.
And I remember being faced with the choice of do I want to study in my limited history credits that I had at the time?
Do I want to study a language which I've never really done before because I had very limited exposure to language,
very limited, or do I want to study the campaigns of Alexander the Great?
And for me, it was just an easy choice for ancient history through and through.
And I thought, well, this just sounds fantastic.
And then it was when I got started my third year at the end, and then I sort of realised that it took me that long to think.
I do sort of want to learn languages now so I can interrogate the text myself when I'm reading them.
And this is something that I recognise when I was doing my masters and especially now my dphil the people when I talk to them about it,
I say, what are you doing in this class? I'm learning modern German now. And I said, Okay, that's great.
I can see why, but how do you get the time for them? So I don't need to learn Latin. I don't need to learn Greek, which, you know, even to develop.
I'm still having to try to learn. Now, I just to think that this is something that doesn't necessarily stop me from being a good historian.
But it definitely means that I feel as if I've gone throughout my undergrad and my masters as
some kind of disadvantage because I didn't have that those language opportunities in school.
And so, again, I think it's important to stress that by no means that does not having these things prevent you from doing what we do.
And I think that's very important.
But of course, it's important to recognise that we should still encourage people when when they go to university, they can still pick these things up.
And that's OK. And sometimes you want to make the choice between an exciting moment for history over the language.
You can absolutely do so. And that does not prevent you, doesn't lock you out of learning any language.
at all further down the line. I think that's such an important message.
What are some of these interdisciplinary connections that you,
the three of you feel that you particularly enjoyed drawing in all the different
elements of the course that you might have done in your undergraduate,
your post grad, or even when you were at school doing if you were able to do classical civilisations, cetera?
What were those Connections that really drew you to then decide, as the three of you did,
that this is the thing I want to study in some shape or form at university, despite some of the barriers that you've faced up to that point?
For me, it was just the breadth of the subjects that were available to study.
I still feel that I haven't decided what I want to do with my life fully.
And it's just like really fun to try new things and be learning all the time.
And so the notion that you can study some language, some history, some art and archaeology,
was just incredibly appealing and I think also is one of the awesome things about the education system in the UK versus the US,
where I work with a lot of people who are educated here. And, you know, it's just kind of different.
You have to study certain things and you don't have the opportunity necessarily to pick a bunch of oddball topics, which I did.
And it definitely was the right path for me.
So I think it was just the breadth of things available at a level and not wanting to specialise too soon was what really drew me.
So I think for me it was again, almost the opposite. I didn't have a lot of choice.
I didn't have a lot of variety when I was at secondary school. And actually my A-levels ended up being sort of English literature and history.
I tried to go down that route as much as I possibly could,
but that was sort of the best that I could think I had because of classical or that or anything like that.
And but even still, of course, my history level was very much modern history,
but it didn't stop me from I ended up doing the extended project qualification, which is sort of a voluntary level that we do.
And I decided that I was going to do it on Roman history because that was the only way that I sort of seeing myself of having an avenue into it.
But I think it was only because I had an alevel in history that I had the confidence to tackle that and thought that I have the necessary skills,
that sort of writing and analysis that I could do anything you which in turn know I could then use that as an outlet.
So to sort of demonstrate to myself, because that was a key moment for me as well.
because that was the first time that I'd ever officially studied anything in ancient history.
And that was really sort of a confirmation for me. This is exactly what I want and need to be doing.
But also as well, I think that at school, I can't underestimate the impact that English literature had on me,
because I remember reading a lot of the classics - The Great Gatsby, Frankenstein and the parallels to myths.
I said I developed this reputation to myself as being the guy who always brought myths to every class without fail.
I can't even remember one class. I don't know how I did it.
I was talking about Julius Caesar. I think in relation to wuthering heights I was really going to quite extreme lengths.
But I think the English literature as a subject was for me it was the best avenue into classics.
And I think that there's a lot of overlap between the two subjects, a lot of interdisciplinarity,
that I think if you don't have access to something like classics, I think is still a very viable option.
Languages, too, is we were just talking about if you do languages at a level. Again, my school didn't offer any languages at a level.
Again, it was difficult for me. But again, that's a very good avenue into classics because, of course, we're talking about languages.
If you have romance languages like French or Italian, it can help you then down the line to Latin.
So I think there's definitely even when it looks like you don't have a lot of choice like I did,
are still definitely various avenues and routes that you can take to still sort of help you try to get into classics.
See, I actually went on a completely different route when I was deciding what I wanted to do because I had no idea.
So I ended up doing A-levels in maths, geography and class civ.
But so for me, it was when I sort of figured out, because obviously those three subjects don't relate to each other.
But it was sort of when I found out that you could study reception and look at things like how classics was portrayed
in the media and also reflections in politics and using modern sort of political ideas to look at the ancient world,
things like that, that I realised, you know what? This is something that I could really get into.
You know, I didn't realise that. And I know that it's still sort of frowned upon area within classics amongst certain groups.
But, you know, looking at the media, looking at reception studies, how, you know, at undergrad, I did a module on classics and TV.
I didn't realise that that was a thing until I discovered that.
And I thought, oh, my God, this is so good. This is such a good way to get people involved in it.
So I think if I'm going back to outreach,
if we emphasise that these are the sort of things that you can look at in classics, more people might be interested.
And it makes it more relevant because, you know,
the sort of things that I get asked when I say that I study classics is, oh, well, why do you want to do that?
It was thousands of years ago. Surely it's completely unrelatable, but it's not the case at all.
I thought, you know,
looking at all of the films that it comes up and I saw that there's a conference happening in the US about classics and music and things like this.
It's just so interesting to me. So that's when I really figured out that I wanted to study classics.
That was something as well that I'd just like to say it really I realised that a bit later on after my undergrad,
I think when I did my dissertation, it's just how applicable the ancient world is to the modern day.
So my research actually focuses on the role played by military veterans during the Republic.
You know, this is this is something that is a concept that still very much alive and important in today's discourse,
especially in terms of the relation with politics.
And there's so many different ways where I think that I can almost just see now the ancient world in modern society.
And that's something that I think, as you were saying Ellie, that you can realise very,
very early on when you think about classical reception and things that we think of our childhoods,
I know we started off by saying how we got into classics and quite a few of us.
It was a case of, you know, Disney's Hercules and things like this and watching films and books.
And I think that that is we definitely can't underestimate the kind of relevance that
that that has in how we view and formulate concepts and ideas in the modern era.
And how have you found, Bertie, moving into the world of work that your classics experience and degree both benefited
you but also just influence your choice of career and the skills that you've deployed?
And as we've just said about political and social cultural impacts of classics today?
This is such a good question. I sort of fell into my career,
so I ended up training as a chartered accountant after I graduated just because
it seemed like a sensible thing to do and very quickly realised I wasn't
destined to be the accountant and fell into a role in PR in an agency and then over
many years ended up at Facebook and leading communications for all of our products,
Facebook, Instagram, etc.
And it's funny, I didn't realise at first that connection until I went back to St. Hilda's for a gathering where we saw some of our old tutors.
And I remember one of my old teachers Dr Innes when she found out what I did.
She said, well, of course you can do PR, you studied Cicero, the master of rhetoric was like, good point.
And I think really for me, just the the discipline around how to form an argument,
how to persuade I'm a communicator by nature, it's my job to communicate,
to persuade whether that's employees, reporters, investors, and just being able to kind of formulate that argument,
to articulate something in a way that really relates to an audience.
I definitely draw back exactly from my degree in the way that we did that.
So it feels very relevant to me from a skillset point of view, even if the subject matter isn't necessarily spot on the same.
And have you ever encountered surprise from people when they find out what your actual degree and your academic background is?
Yes, very, very often. And obviously, Classics is a known discipline in the U.S. as well.
But I have not found many other classicists in my line of work, although my boss, Mark Zuckerberg,
is very, very passionate about classics and has talked a lot about that publicly, too.
So that's that's fun. What are some of the things that you feel you wish were talked more about in classics?
I think we've mentioned lots from a school's perspective and maybe an outreach one, but just more widely within the discipline,
whether that be amongst academics or teachers or even in the public eye, in the media.
What are some of the things you wish were talked about more or perhaps some that you wish we talked about less?
I was just so excited to hear Ellie, about your areas of study when I was studying classics 20 years ago.
Don't tell anyone. There was no real sense of thinking about social justice or issues of race, so it just wasn't even on the radar.
I was always kind of the lonely only being a black woman.
That just was I think I was maybe one of the black women in the entire year studying classics.
So it was just something that I kind of couldn't really think about or else I would become too self-conscious.
And I love the idea.
But now the discipline is kind of embracing a lot more intersectionality and ways of studying the past that incorporate some of our present as well.
So I just was really excited to hear about your area of study.
And that's something that that seems very important for students to focus on now, of course, across all subjects.
Something as well, I think that is sort of an issue that we're currently having in classics, aside from,
you know, the name itself classics, and what that can represent is that there's a tendency in it.
And again, it took me a while to realise this, that throughout my undergrad of,
you know, when we think about what is classics and what is ancient history,
we just instinctively, you know, we just go to ancient Greeks and Rome and of course, that there's so much to be, so much what we don't have.
But it's you know, when I was going through my undergrad and I remember thinking about how the Romans were portraying others, particularly,
I remember the Parthian empire at the time and thinking how this was something that was portrayed
as being so dangerous that it was rivalling Roman that Rome had to try and subdue this fact.
And then it clicked with me then. Then I thought and I did a module on Cyrus the Great in the Persian Empire, my undergrad.
And I thought, you know, these these things are these empires. Persia and Parthia afterwards are just as important and just as significant
in terms of world development as the Roman Empire was and ancient Greece.
And yet I think that that's something that obviously has got a lot better in recent years.
But it's still something that I think we need to work out when we say the words concepts and we say,
you know, it's ancient history, what are we really talking about? Are we talking about ancient Greece and ancient Rome exclusively,
or do we mean ancient history and everything that is involved in the empires of Egypt?
And even before that, the Hittite empires, Parthia, Persia and all these things that are just as important as just a significant state interaction
and and even themes such as imperialism by no means exclusive to the development of Greece.
And yet I think we have this tendency to just sometimes prioritise, you know, the sort of more Western Roman Greek history.
Yeah, absolutely,
so I look a little bit ancient Nubia in my studies and sort of the interaction between ancient Nubia and ancient Egypt in the Hellenistic period.
And it's so strange to me that these countries, they bordered each other and yet it's sort of like ancient history,
the discipline has drawn a line underneath Egypt and said, no, after this, it doesn't matter.
It's not part of ancient history. And, you know, even going beyond that sort of the interaction, interactions between Rome and the east,
we see Rome as being ancient history and the contemporary history in the east as
being other and sort of mysterious and sort of a completely different discipline,
which although, you know, the world's a big place, there were many different cultures all living together.
Why is it that when you say ancient history and when you sign up to study in ancient history,
we know we all know that that means Greece, Rome, maybe a bit of Egypt.
And you know that interactions with other places why doesn't include Nubia, you know, maybe places like South America, you know, so interesting.
But there's just nothing. And I think that it also speaks to a wider problem in British teaching of history and in schools and universities,
that it's very sort of white centric, it's very sort of Eurocentric.
And yeah. So it's something that is a problem in classics, but it's something that was rippled out,
just the study of history in general and something that we need to address.
And I think, as we've mentioned before, the fact that Classics has this extra element of the language literature element that creates
additional barriers and complications compared to perhaps the discipline of history in and of itself.
Do you think that I know, Alexander, you just touched on this in terms of the name of classics.
Can we break down one of those barriers by altering that name?
Do you think by with that, would that make a difference or is the terminology just a product rather than the actual problem at the root?
That, of course, I think that terminology can only go so far.
And what we can do by changing names, there's only so much that that can do.
I still think it's important. You know, as I said, when when I was sort of in secondary school,
when I was weighing up my options about what I wanted to do university, I said I did a dual degree in history and ancient history.
And to me, ancient history. That was essentially what it was a name.
It was the period before history. The ancient part of history and classics definitely had a reputation to me as being classical literature.
You know, that's what I sort of associated with the term.
And when I say classics, I thought The Iliad or The Aeneid, and these were things that were completely foreign to me,
mainly because I think that when I thought of those, I thought, I don't know how to read Latin, how am I going to read the Aeneid?
And so I think that there's definitely something we can do by the word classics and breaking that down.
And in terms of things you have, the classics is an amalgamation of many different disciplines.
You have classical literature, as I just said. But there's also more to that.
It's not just exactly literature, there's reception. And these are all very important aspects of classics.
And I think that absolutely, if we think about what classics means, we can start to remove those barriers.
But ultimately, again, I think that terminology can only go so far in that we perhaps need to do more in terms of encouraging people to be of our age,
about thinking about the discipline as a whole in terms of history, even something such as Egyptology and these these labels can be very useful.
But again, we just have to be a bit more aware of what we actually need to say them.
We've already, I think, dispelled some myths so far in this episode,
but are there any other myths about classics or particularly perhaps about Oxford and your Oxford classics experiences that you'd like to dispel?
For me, my experience at Oxford was really defining and a bunch of ways and my expectations,
I suppose really many of the people that I met and got to know and became friends with were from a different kind of social strata than I was.
And my learning was like, I approach things in a way that I suppose like naive and self-conscious,
but was able to kind of make wonderful friends and find spots where I was able to fit in and really thrive and so that
for me was was really defining, knowing that I could fit in in many different environments and areas instead of feeling excluded.
So I found it an incredibly positive experience over time.
And looking back now, I think I if I was approaching a similar experience now, I think I would be a lot more self conscious about it.
But I certainly had a really great experience. I would like to add as well, actually, when I moved into my flat on my flatmates,
they referred to me as Northern because I was north of Oxford, therefore I was northern and this was having done my undergrad in Liverpool.
Very bizarre to me, this idea of being called Northern.
But actually there's something I would I would say got better at a time when I first arrived, I didn't get very overwhelmed with this notion.
And I thought to myself, wow am I really alone here?
Is there anyone else from my background or is everybody here been learning Latin since the age of eight?
I see after a while after talking to a lot of people, I did realise that while, of course,
there are so many people with so many varied socioeconomic backgrounds, in terms of a regional perspective,
I certainly was not the only person from the Midlands, but from the North, as you know,
it was collectively referred to, which the Midlands most certainly is not, something that I think that it took me a while initially to get over.
And this was the fear that I had going into it. But I thought, am I really going to be isolated?
But I think that, you know, as we prove by doing this, that's certainly not the case.
Yeah, I am. I had a similar experience of people telling me that I was from the North before I started Oxford during my DPhil and my master's.
Actually, I was very self-conscious of my educational background and sort of, you know, being, state educated, all of this.
Am I going to be the only person?
And that's one myth about Oxford, even though, you know, you're not going to find that you do have the same background as everybody there.
That doesn't mean that people aren't going to appreciate your background.
People are going to be critical of your background or anything like that.
And one myth that I would like to dispel about classics is that it's boring.
It's not boring at all. It's super interesting. It's the most interesting subject ever, in my opinion, you know, and it is relatable.
It is applicable to modern day. And you know what?
even if it isn't just doing a subject that you love and that you find interesting, there's a lot to be said for that.
You know, it's got all of us this far. And I know that not everybody has the same opportunities and things like that.
But even the majority of people watch television, watch films, have the Internet, play games, things like this,
to have more sort of opportunities for people to see classics in the media and also see people like us who study classics in the media.
You know, different people are getting into it. Different people are looking at different things in the subjects.
And I think to portray that to a wider audience of people would be so beneficial to get people interested in the subject because it is not boring.
Well, you are all fantastic ambassadors for the subject, and I think your experiences speak for themselves in terms of where Classics has
taken you and still has so many other places and directions in which to take you
But you can tell even, you know, after the first time you encountered that subject,
that your passion and enthusiasm for the subject has never, never dimmed, which is fantastic to hear.
I mean something that was kind of on my mind in terms of when we're thinking about the Midlands as a region is something that always stuck with me.
And I remember that was just before I went to university. So I decided I was going to do at least partially a degree in ancient history,
which ended up being fully I remember mentioning this to people at the time.
I was working part time in a retail store. And I remember I mentioned this to all of my colleagues who said, What are you doing?
And I said, I'm going to go off to study ancient history. And after the initial question of what's that, which again, I still get to this day,
which I think is bizarre, I explained it and then she sort of and I'll never forget what she said.
And she sort of said, that's not what people from around here do, is it? And that was something that really stuck with me.
And I thought about and I thought, no, actually, it's not none of as far as I'm aware, I was the only person from my school to go and do classics.
None of my family my parents only went to university when I was much, much older, long after I was born.
And no one in my family, when I think about the Midlands.
It was always just very you grew up and you left school and you went into an industrial career.
That was everything that my parents did. My grandparents, my great grandparents. You left school.
You joined an industrial family that was an engineer, like a country of engineers. Just that's what you did.
And to break that mould and to suggest something seemingly as bizarre as classics at university was very much taboo.
And that's something, I think, that we have to work on.
When we think about outreach, of course, it's going to depend on whether you're from the Northwest, the Northeast, the Midlands, the South,
etc. But in terms of the Midlands specifically,
I think that that's something that needs to be addressed because it was certainly what I had at the time.
It really just felt as if I was taking this massive leap, a massive gamble into the unknown.
And I now realise that that's just not the case. You know, Classics is a very valuable and very large, sprawling discipline that just so much worth in it.
And yet it was something that when I dared to say that I was doing that, I wanted my school to introduce an A level.
It was shut down as the most ludicrous thing I could possibly have said, because that's not what we do.
And again, I think that that's just not true. Alexander, that really resonates for me just often.
I've had a friend refer to it as like the tyranny of low expectations from people around you.
I was I was a silver service waitress. At the Molyneux football ground for the Wolves team in all of my teenage years.
And I remember a someone who was eating at the restaurant asking what I was going to do, and I said, oh, I'm going to go to Oxford.
And they smiled and said, Oh, Oxford Brookes, which is a perfectly wonderful university but is not Oxford.
And it was just like, you know,
they just corrected me because they couldn't possibly have expected somebody who looked and sounded like me to be going off and studying Oxford.
And so I think you're so right that we just need to kind of open people's apertures and
expectations for what people from the Midlands can accomplish because we can do anything.
Well, I think that's a fantastic note on which to end, that's a message for everyone listening to this,
to Bertie, Ellie and Alexander, I just I say a huge thank you for your time on the podcast today.
It's been absolutely brilliant to talk to you. And thank you, everybody, for joining and listening.