Brooklyn College remains home to a stellar collection of faculty who study and teach the ancient and medieval world in a range of departments. In fact, Brooklyn College’s particular collection of premodernists is quite rare: no private college in the New York area can boast of having such a remarkable assemblage. In total, 25 faculty members at Brooklyn College are premodernists, and many of them meet monthly as part of the Late Antique-Medieval-Early Modern Faculty Working Group (LAMEM), which celebrates its 10^th anniversary this year. Brooklyn College will be hosting its second major academic conference for premodernists this summer, organized by Lauren Mancia (History) and Brian Sowers (Classics), called Fragments of Experience: Approaching ‘Lived Religion’ from Late Antiquity to the Central Middle Ages.

Brooklyn College continues to send a significant number of students to graduate school to study the premodern in Art, Classics, English, and History departments. Many of those students have become professors themselves, carrying on the tradition of the Magisterial Feminae. The Latin/Greek Institute is holding its 50th annual summer in 2023, its role ever more vital as the teaching of the classical languages are increasingly being reduced if not discarded outright at American universities.

This exhibit seeks to showcase a collection of professors who used their training as premodernists for the benefit of Brooklyn College. Their scholarship helped build the college’s reputation in the pages of academic journals; their teaching imprinted generations of students with the ability and confidence to pursue their dreams; and their work helped make Brooklyn College one of the highest quality institutions of liberal arts education in the United States. Time and time again, they found a way to marry their intellectual passions with their mission as educators: they understood that seeking to understand the past, and teaching the tools necessary to decipher and interpret that past, was at the core of a great undergraduate education.

In the words of Dr. Vera Lachmann from the 1961 Breuklundian yearbook:

[Modernity] “make us question traditional enthusiasms…[it] maligns love as a desire for power, devotion as hypocrisy, beauty as popular appeal…[but this] ultimate denial of values…must end in paralysis, preparing perhaps for atomic extinction…[Instead,] the building material for the future is understanding. More desired than passionate love, a more reverent service than piety, its possibility amazes a disillusioned generation. That the frozen isolation, the deadly silence around each self, the dizziness of our absurdity does not preclude its occurrence, that must be called a wonder of wonders. Understanding heals and redeems the hopeless. To understand is still the ‘violent grace of the gods to unwilling men’ as the chorus of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon calls it. [Understanding] may save the [hu]man of the future from the course of utter moral confusion.” May Brooklyn College always be a place where the quest for understanding—of the premodern or otherwise—remains our core mission, for students, faculty, staff, and administrators alike.