Annales

E(i)ditorial — December 2015

December was a busy month for Eidolon. We redesigned the front page of the publication and made it easier to navigate by adding thematic categories. We also published eight articles, including two project announcements and two reviews:

Tara Mulder reviewed a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in which the title character was played as a woman in She Doth Bestride the Narrow World Like a Colossus
Jason Pedicone announced the launch of the Legion Project, an outreach initiative by the Paideia Institute to find classicists who don’t work in academia and reintegrate them into the discipline, in Classicists, Your Name is Legion
Claire Hall compared the (sub)literary forms of the tweet and ancient epigram in I Am in Every Pocket, Every Hand
Marissa Henry pondered the allure and meaning of the mysterious “first computer” in The Antikythera Mechanism
In the first installment of Eidolon’s new advice column for classicists, Prudentiae sal., someone asked what to do if the job search has sapped their intellectual energy in Uninspired and Not Yet Hired
Helen Morales reviewed Spike Lee’s Chi-raq, a controversial adaptation of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, in (Sex) Striking Out
I argued that Ovid’s Ars Amatoria presages the toxic ideology of modern pickup artists in Bang Rome
Stanford Classics In Theater showed how Aristophanes can be used to deconstruct the messy, sordid, and utopian aspects of democracy in Adapting Aristophanes in Silicon Valley

Next week, at the annual meeting of the Society for Classical Studies, Eidolon is hosting a roundtable on the topic of “Vox Populo: The Risks and Rewards of Public Scholarship.” Two of Eidolon’s writers, Michael Fontaine and Dan-el Padilla Peralta, have written statements for the roundtable. You can read them here:

As an individual, I’ve done less public scholarship than either Michael or Dan-el. So instead I’ll take more of a bird’s-eye view of the issue, extrapolating from what I’ve learned from editing Eidolon over the last eight months.

I’ve compiled some basic demographic information about Eidolon and its writers to share, because I believe in transparency and I think the information is relevant in showing who wants to do public scholarship. Here are some of the basic figures:

• Since the launch of Eidolon eight months ago, we’ve published 57 articles and 8 editorials by a total of 42 individual writers. Those articles have been viewed over 98,000 times.
• Of our 42 writers, 23 are male and 19 are female. We didn’t achieve that near-parity easily, but it was well worth it—female authors wrote three of our top five articles, accounting for over a quarter of the journal’s total traffic.
• 7 of those 42 writers were either tenured or on the tenure track; 18 writers had PhDs and were in postdocs, VAPs, or employed outside or alongside of academia; 8 writers were graduate students; 4 writers were high school teachers or otherwise employed in Classics without PhDs; 5 were undergraduates or had just gotten their BAs.

Here are some of the general conclusions I think we can draw from these data and from my personal observation and discussion with writers:

1. Young scholars want to write for wider audiences. In the past, public scholarship was been exclusively the domain of very established professors. But it’s clear to me that young scholars are interested in writing about intersections between the study of classics and the world we live in. And audiences want to read what younger scholars have to say — of Eidolon’s top ten most-viewed articles, only one is by a tenured professor.
2. For scholars on the tenure track, the biggest risk to public scholarship is opportunity cost. I’ve been approached many times by people with tenure-track jobs who tell me that they would love to write for Eidolon, but they don’t have the time at present. Tenure-track professors represent the smallest group of Eidolon writers.
3. Many tenured professors still view writing for the public as a waste of time. A few writers who are either graduate students or recent PhDs have reported to me that they were told by advisers that they were wasting their valuable time by writing Eidolon articles. That saddens me, because I believe that for younger scholars the opportunities have the potential to outweigh the cost. Eidolon articles have led to positive outcomes ranging from networking to collaboration to lecture opportunities to book contracts. But for those without a tenure-track job, none of those things is valuable enough to justify antagonizing an adviser. Why should it have to be an either/or situation there?
4. With a few exceptions, our writers fall on the liberal side of the political spectrum. 15 of our articles are about gender and sexuality, usually with a liberal focus. Our writers have also written articles that were (either obliquely or directly) in support of Planned Parenthood, Black Lives Matter, gay marriage, gun control, and immigration reform. This liberal tendency isn’t due to selection bias on my part — I have never and would never reject an article because I disagreed with its politics. The liberal bias of our articles could be because the academy as a whole is very liberal, but I do wonder if people with more conservative politics are deterred from writing for public venues.
5. And — ending on perhaps my most provocative point — the likelihood of internet abuse is not substantially higher than it is for traditional scholarship. Some of our writers have gotten pushback for their articles. Especially for articles on controversial topics, we’ve received the occasional irate response on Medium or comment on Facebook. But many of those responses were from academics criticizing the author for not citing this or that text, which I consider not entirely in the spirit of internet scholarship. As for my personal experience, I wrote an article about pickup artists and tweeted it directly at some men’s rights advocates, and the worst I got were a few tweets about how I’m ugly and my work is “decent for a female.” But my youth, relation to a famous person, and baking blog were also used a few years ago to critique a book review I wrote for a traditional venue. I’m by no means convinced that the world at large is more vicious than the academic community can be. After all, the worst an anonymous commenter can do is spew vitriol. An academic can ruin your career.

For me, both personally and professionally, editing Eidolon has been a tremendously rewarding experience. It’s led to exciting and challenging new projects and connections with brilliant scholars. But there’s another way to take the idea expressed in the subtitle of this roundtable. I’ve been thinking about the topic mostly in terms of the risks and rewards for individual writers, but I think we also need to discuss the risks and rewards for our discipline as a whole.

Eidolon articles can sometimes have a wide reach — they’re shared on news sites like Newsweek, Hacker News, and the Huffington Post, along with academic and feminist blogs. But I know some scholars who think that the kind of writing that’s done on Eidolon isn’t representative of our discipline and that our focus on making the classics relevant is presentist and not intellectually serious.

These critiques deserve serious consideration, but I may be too biased to provide it. The energy and personal investment involved in editing Eidolon prevent me from maintaining the necessary distance required for objective analysis.

But the very fact that I feel I can admit my failure to be objective is one of Eidolon’s greatest strengths. It has always been our mission to give writers a platform to use their personal voice. If we’ve helped writers and readers connect to the classical world on a more personal level, then I believe the rewards of public scholarship have outweighed the risks.

Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Her first book, currently titled Classics Beyond the Manosphere, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.