BU Humanists at Work: Meet Timothy Clark
“The field is changing, and you might be surprised by how it illuminates or gives you new perspectives about the modern world,” says Timothy Clark, Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical Studies.
While Clark acknowledges that “sitting around reading Latin and thinking big thoughts” is still a “valuable part of the classical studies discipline,” the associated image of a bunch of stodgy old men in their tweed jackets surrounded by leather bound books is becoming ancient history.
“There are ways of making the classical world connect to modern day issues and reading ancient texts with new theories that foreground the experiences of women, minorities, and the oppressed,” he explains. In his research and teaching, Clark takes a highly interdisciplinary approach to engage with and contribute to new directions in classical studies.
Broadly speaking, Clark’s research looks at “histories of Roman ideologies of imperialism.” He is particularly interested in Rome’s relationship with its neighbors in what we now call the Middle East and how Rome’s perceptions of them as “others and enemies” impacts its own ideologies of empire.
While surviving literary sources provide valuable records of the basic facts of Roman history, they only present that history as perceived by their authors: literate, powerful men. To better understand how imperial ideologies were presented to different strata of Roman society, Clark consciously turns to surviving evidence that different types of Roman people would have come into contact with such as coins, art, architecture, inscriptions, and public ceremonies.
Clark provides an example from his forthcoming monograph of a particular public ceremony in the year 63 C.E., demonstrating how the “use all of the tools at our disposal” approach can yield “a sense of what Rome was like holistically, beyond just the elites.” Literary sources recount that Parthia and Armenia catastrophically defeated Rome in a major battle. As part of the treaty that ended the war, the new Parthian-appointed king of Armenia came to Rome to be crowned in a public ceremony in the center of the Roman forum. Literary sources give the impression that thousands of people witnessed this public spectacle, but by comparing literary evidence to archaeological evidence, Clark determined that attendance by thousands was not physically possible. This discovery led to new lines of inquiry: “Who was allowed to attend? Just the elites? Common people? Were there tickets? Why did Emperor Nero put this seminal spectacle in this physical, spatial, ideological environment?”
As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Clark was inspired by a professor who “talked about history being a human endeavor created by humans and therefore created with all of their errors and biases.” As a teacher, Clark tries to convey this view of history to students as they engage with new literary and material sources. “I always put up a list of questions, especially when it comes to literary sources,” he says: “Who is the author? When is he writing? How temporally distant is he from the period he’s writing about? What’s his agenda? etc.”
Wherever possible, Clark likes to create opportunities for students to engage with primary sources in a tangible way. Last semester, his class visited the MFA, where they had the opportunity to view ancient artifacts. “It’s one thing for me to talk about these objects or show images of them in a Powerpoint, and it’s another thing to see them in 3D in real life. You learn about the history of objects from antiquity to the present and you get a taste for how the ancient world is not static. It’s part of an ongoing conversation,” he says.
Clark points to a particular example that his class examined at the MFA, a statue of a Roman woman. He explains that her head and body were originally from two different statues and were placed together during the Renaissance to create the statue that is on view today.
“When you deal with a piece of material culture, you have to deal with both parts of the history, how it was used in antiquity and who owned this object later,” Clark explains. Engagement with this statue prompted students to consider questions that encompass a huge temporal span: Why is the statue, which was originally created with pigment, now only white? Why was it created out of unrelated fragments? How and why did this statue make its way from ancient Rome to modern day Boston?
Clark believes that studying classical history and culture with attention to its interpretations over time is particularly important in our current historical moment. In a time when numerous alt right groups are misappropriating and distorting Roman history and culture in accessible digital spaces to suit their white supremacist and patriarchal agendas, Clark is adamant that his students develop an awareness of historical misappropriations and the necessary tools to combat false narratives.
For students who are interested in having difficult conversations about sensitive but paramount issues like race, class, gender, and ethnicity, Clark believes that the classical world can offer a unique and perhaps surprising opportunity. “It’s distant enough temporarily that we can have conversations about difficult issues like race and ethnicity without it feeling so immediate and hot button. I think that’s really valuable,” he says.
“There are ways in which it feels very familiar and way that it feels different enough that we can see the differences,” Clark says of ancient Roman and contemporary American society. He maintains that, despite an enormous temporal span, many of the heated debates that we are having today are, at their core, not so different from debates that occupied people in the ancient world.
This semester, Clark’s students will engage with some of those debates in CL 322, which will cover Roman history from the founding of the republic to the third century C.E. with an emphasis on how Rome’s conception of others (ethnic, social, religions) impacts the creation of Roman identity.