Future of the Past Lab

Freedom has a long intellectual history in the West, and it is obviously one of the core values that we hold in American culture, amplified by the upcoming 250th anniversary of our founding as a nation. Freedom, indeed, has been thought of as the sole possession of the Western intellectual and democratic traditions, originally tracing its roots back to Greece and Rome. Our guest in this episode, J...

Politics and art can have an interesting and sometimes fraught relationship with each other. Poets can participate in presidential inaugurations, as has been seen in recent years in the United States, and their role there has been to celebrate the new president and to potentially challenge him to live up the ideals of America. American songwriters have a history of being more pointed in their crit...

Studying the past begins with archives, those places where artifacts are gathered, stored, and preserved. Archives of manuscripts, in particular, have stories of their own and often shape the way we understand the past just by the nature of their origins and how they have survived through the ages. Although major collections are now held in museums and preserved by professionals, a century or more...

Classical archaeology has traditionally focused on the big finds—monumental buildings, temples, statuary, and villas. These finds are dramatic and have created some of the most famous elements of the landscape of classical Greece and Rome. But they also give a skewed vision of the ancient world because the big finds only represent a small sliver of ancient life—that of the elite populations and of...

Classical philology is not usually considered a font of social change, with its very detailed and rigorous look at the language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. But our guest for this episode sees tremendous potential precisely in the careful work of philology to give us new avenues of civic engagement and social change both in Africa and in the United States. David van Schoor, a classic...

The Book of Revelation and other ancient apocalypses portray visions and prophecies that spoke to the moment of their times. The language and imagery depict the divine power that promises to deliver audiences from the powerful, often imperial, oppression that they endured. These apocalypses are both violent and hopeful—violent for the oppressors and hopeful for the oppressed. Our guest today, Harv...

Ancient Egypt continues to fascinate, as it has for hundreds of years now. Museums hold pride of place when it comes to the mechanism by which many people encounter ancient Egypt, whether it be through modern art that uses Egyptian motifs or by the careful display of actual artifacts from ancient Egypt for museum-goers to encounter. Exhibitions featuring Egyptian artifacts are often the gem of anc...

In the past 10 years, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a social concept has risen to the highest levels of institutionalization under the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as in higher education and corporate settings. It has been seen as a crucial corrective to the long history of institutional racism that has plagued our country from even before its founding. DEI has also been raised u...

When the eras of history are re-examined from multiple perspectives, we can begin to see that the boundaries of eras, not to mention the generally accepted names of them, are not so clear. Today, we are talking with Young Kim from the University of Illinois Chicago whose work examines Cyprus of the fifth and sixth centuries as a case study in the transition from so-called Late Antiquity to the Mid...

A conversation with Anna Rosensweig from the University of Rochester who shares with us her latest work on how Christian Nationalists and QAnon conspiracists in the US are currently mobilizing texts, images, and ideas from the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion in France. Visit futureofthepastlab.com for information about our program, our blog and links to future and past events. To support this p...