Teaching With Du Bois: Classics and the Future of the Liberal Arts in America

FAIN: FT-286076-22

Harriet Fertik
University of New Hampshire (Durham, NH 03824-2620)

Research and writing leading to a book on Du Bois’s engagement with Greek and Roman texts from the turn of the twentieth century until just after World War II. 

Teaching With Du Bois: Classics and the Future of the Liberal Arts in America explores how W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), a groundbreaking African American scholar and activist, deployed Greek and Roman antiquity in his theories of political education and how his work can help us to rethink the liberal arts in the twenty-first century. This book participates in conversations about racism and anti-Blackness in Classics and it takes the innovations these conversations have prompted to a broader audience, in the academy and beyond, that is invested in the future of the liberal arts. Building on Du Bois’s engagement with Classics, from the turn of the twentieth century to after World War II, I explore how the liberal arts create opportunities to listen for and to amplify the voices of those who are absent, and I argue that this practice of listening is essential preparation for life in a multiracial democracy.