Brooklyn College professors cracked the code of ancient writing systems; they transformed the way we think about history in theory vs. history as it actually was lived; they wrote essential textbooks that helped to train thousands of students; and they did tremendous, ground-breaking research while simultaneously committed to teaching their students and participating in (if not leading) the administration of Brooklyn College.
The skills and mindsets required to study the ancient world equipped many of these women with the abilities to approach, analyze, and assess circumstances in unique and novel ways. Given the timeframe studied and its relative distance from the present, the evidentiary sources available to the premodernist are limited in number, type, and quality. As a result, most premodernists train in and across multiple academic disciplines in order to amalgamate the skills necessary to work with fragmentary data. As a result, they are naturally collaborative and interdisciplinary.
This is well reflected among our Feminae. In the 1970s, Art Professor Dr. Frederica Wachsburger co-founded Women’s Studies as an interdisciplinary major that drew from research and coursework in Anthropology, Art, Classics, English, History, Judaic Studies, Political Science, Sociology, and other departments to inform the breadth of its content. In the 1970s, Dr. Gail Smith, Professor of Classics and LGI faculty, began to teach classes on the reception of the Classics by 19th and 20th century African American thinkers. In the 1980s, Dr. Gladys Shoemaker received an NEH grant that allowed the Classics Department to collaborate with the Brooklyn College School of Education to establish a “Language Arts Through Latin” program in 20 of the 32 school districts in New York City. In the 1980s, Classics Professor and Provost Ethyle R. Wolfe used her multi-disciplinary experience to model Brooklyn College’s award-winning, interdisciplinary, liberal arts Core Curriculum—an effort for which she received presidential recognition.
In addition, the premodernist’s experience with fragmentary and variegated data is readily transferable to other fields of inquiry with similar challenges. With a Classics degree under her belt, English Professor Marion Starling pivoted the focus of her PhD studies and became the first person to collect, analyze, and edit slave narratives in her 1947 dissertation. With her experience analyzing and reclaiming marginal voices through her research on medieval literature, Dr. Nancy B. Black co-edited White On Red: Images of the American Indian in 1976, one of the first collections to consider the racialized perception of Native Americans in the white gaze.
Finally, premodern studies requires scholars to know many obscure (and often “dead”) languages, an esoteric skill with transferability in novel and unexpected ways. In the 1930s, Dr. Alice Kober used her facility in Classical languages to quickly and systematically learn Braille, becoming the first faculty member to transcribe final exams for blind students at the College. Similarly, Dr. Margaret Bryant used her knowledge of the history of the English language to write a grammar book that made English easier to teach to Japanese and Scandinavian language speakers, making her an international bestseller in those markets.
Though it may at first seem counterintuitive, the study of the premodern is innovative, forward-thinking, adaptive, and inclusive. It rewards one with skills applicable to many contexts and essential in the wider world.
Dr. Elsa de Haas’ Antiquities of Bail (1940)
In English law, bail is often characterized as one of the great liberties available–and it came into being in the 12th and 13th centuries. Using Germanic sources, Dr. de Haas here traces the long history of bail leading up to 13th century English law. At a time when women weren’t regularly accepted at law schools, this may have been Dr. de Haas’ only way of exercising her legal interests while in the Government & Sociology Department at Brooklyn College.
Dr. Marion Starling's The Slave Narrative (1988)
Dr. Starling majored in Latin and Greek as an undergraduate at Hunter. When she arrived at NYU for her PhD work, she decided to take her experience of the ancient fragmentary record and apply it to another source type: slave narratives. What resulted in her 1947 dissertation was the first compilation of edited slave narratives ever made (and which she published in 1988 as this book).
Letter from Dr. Alice Kober to Classics chair (1947)
Dr. Alice Kober (Classics, 1935-1950) worked her whole scholarly life to decipher the pictogram-filled script Linear B (dating to 1450 B.C.E., from the ancient Minoan civilization on the island of Crete). She created in depth statistical charts on every character of the script, but only published a few articles before her untimely death in 1950. In 1952, an English man, Michael Ventris, suddenly cracked the code, getting all the credit even though he used Kober’s work as an unattributed, unrecognized foundation. Here she writes to the Chair of Classics about her work with another Linear B scholar in Oxford, England.
Dr. Margaret Bryant’s A Story of Achievement (1990)
Dr. Bryant’s autobiography traces her life from South Carolina to Brooklyn College (English, 1930-1971). She was the first woman to teach in the Men’s Division at Brooklyn College in 1930, about which she said: “the men were much more afraid of me than I was of them.” Bryant studied many premodern languages, including Middle English, Latin, Hittite, and Middle High German, and taught classes in the History of the English Language, Linguistics, and English grammar at Brooklyn College.
Dr. Ethyle R. Wolfe’s Travel Diary (1956)
Dr. Wolfe’s travel diary during a trip to the Mediterranean in her early years at Brooklyn College, during which for the first time in real life she encountered many of the ancient sites she had studied in books. Between each page, she places a bit of the flora of the Mediterranean. Here she talks about a June trip to Delphi and Mount Parnassus. She says “I can see why this was picked as the spiritual center” of ancient Greece with its view, sea, and snow-capped mountains.
Dr. Jacqueline De Weever’s Sheba’s Daughters (1999)
Dr. De Weever’s work on race and ethnicity in the Middle Ages opened up new avenues for understanding the diversity of the period and its connections to the present day. De Weever’s groundbreaking book on “whitening and demonizing the Saracen woman in medieval French epic” explores the representation of Black women in medieval European literature, making her book one of the first books to consider race in the premodern period (a very popular field now, twenty-three years later).
The Ancient World, by Dr. Mary Francis Gyles with Brooklyn College student annotations (1966)
Classics was considered essential learning at CUNY early on, as is made clear by this heavily-annotated textbook from the Brooklyn College Reserves desk. At its first commencement in 1932, Brooklyn College required every graduate to swear the Ephebic Oath, like ancient Athenians, promising to “fight for the ideals and sacred things,” and “strive to transmit this city greater, better, and more beautiful than it was when it was transmitted to us.” To this day, there is a cast of an ancient stele recording the Ephebic Oath on the main quad, outside of the Brooklyn College Library.
Dr. Nancy B. Black’s Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (2003)
English professor Nancy Black spent her career doing lots of types of work (she spent significant time coordinating the pedagogical efforts of the faculty and defending the liberal arts in writing, for example). Like so many female professors, her medieval monograph thus took a long time to emerge. But it finally did in 2003, as a glorious interdisciplinary study of thirteenth- to fifteenth-century literature, constructions of gender, and medieval manuscripts.
Dr. Elizabeth A.R. Brown’s “The Tyranny of a Construct” and other inscribed articles (1974)
With her article “The Tyranny of a Construct: Feudalism and the Historians of Medieval Europe” in The American Historical Review (1974), Elizabeth Brown single-handedly transformed the way that historians understood the landscape of the Middle Ages: she explained how “feudalism” was not a system or form of government, and that its use as a term prevented historians from really understanding what happened in the past. This article is still essential reading for every medievalist today, and Brown has published over 105 articles in her time as a scholar.
Dr. Marilyn Katz’s Women in Ancient Greece: The 9th-6th Centuries (1972)
This is the draft of an article that was eventually published as “Early Greece: The Origins of the Western Attitude Towards Women” (Arethusa, 1973), in which Katz sought to obtain some “perspective on our own values” through the lens of the Greek city-state.
