As a linguistic activist, Skye has created change in her field by addressing long-lasting gender gaps in spoken Latin through her nonprofit organization Lupercal and by fostering spaces for women to have a voice in the ancient language. She has a Master’s in Latin Pedagogy from UMass Boston and is now a PhD student at University College London, where her research explores women’s Neo-Latin writing of the early modern period.
We spoke to Skye about her Classics career to date, how Lupercal began and how it has evolved, and advice for Latin teachers looking to cultivate more diverse and inclusive classrooms.
1.What made you want to pursue a career in the Classics?
I was lucky to have had an incredible Latin teacher, Dr. Michael Fiveash, in high school. He ignited my love of language, mythology, and history that continues to this day. I found Latin very challenging, and though it was one of my favorite classes, I struggled with it for many years—really until I started to speak Latin and got inside the language that way. I saw how much Dr. Fiveash’s passion for the subject kept me motivated, and realized that I’d like to try to have that same impact on students’ lives. In many ways, he also is responsible for my linguistic activism. He showed us the ways Latin has been used to exclude others and foster elitism, and urged us to be a part of the solution to these problems. Although he sadly passed away after my first year of teaching, I know he would be overjoyed to notice the many positive changes we’re making toward equity in Latin teaching today.
2. How and why did you start Lupercal?
I was teaching at an all-girls’ school at the time, and saw first-hand how much students benefited from exploring cultural and historical themes in Latin class with other girls. They seemed open to asking questions and sharing honest reactions to even the most misogynistic myths, and I knew Latin teachers would benefit from that encouraging space as well. At the same time, I was also applying for summer professional development opportunities. I noticed that my list of programs was much shorter than my male colleagues’; some of the most popular programs had a well-documented history of either overt exclusion of women, harassment of women, or a boys’ club mentality that would keep women on the margins of the experience. I wanted to create events to close that opportunity gap, and encourage others to do the same.
Lupercal started off small; I invited about five women over to my small studio apartment to enjoy reading women’s history in Latin over coffee and pastries. Every month it grew, and soon spread to other cities and eventually other countries. Now that COVID has brought us all online, we’ve become an international community that meets every few days, instead of once a month!
3.What are the aims and ambitions of Lupercal?
At Lupercal, we have three major themes: Communitas (community), Herstoria (herstory), and Latinitas Viva (living Latin). We focus on celebrating women’s voices, texts, and experiences while connecting with each other using Latin as a language for unity and engagement. At the heart of our organization is a reading group in which we read a different biography every month of a woman from Giovanni Boccaccio’s book De Mulieribus Claris (On Famous Women). We also provide book donations, Latin conversation groups for different levels, a contemporary book club which has hosted authors like Helen Morales and Mary Beard, support spaces, conference presentations, a summer internship program, and other programming. Our ambition is for our members to feel supported, confident, and empowered in Latin studies so that they can be leaders in our field.
4.What advice would you give Latin teachers wanting to make their Latin classrooms more inclusive, diverse spaces?
I have a lot of ideas, and have really enjoyed my freelance work as a curriculum consultant on these matters because it’s helped me see the challenges schools face in implementing changes, and how they can be overcome. Here are some essential steps to get started:
- Make sure to stay up-to-date on Latin scholarship and pedagogy as much as possible, because so many incredible resources are coming out every year that were not accessible to us when we learned Latin. Just because we learned (perhaps as recently as within the last decade) about gender, sexuality, race, and class in the Roman world doesn’t necessarily mean that the information is still current. Thankfully, there are a lot of fun and easy ways to meet this goal: listening to podcasts, attending virtual lectures, and inviting a scholar to come as a guest speaker to your class are a few ways to stay abreast of these new resources.
- Model for students what it looks like to notice bias in texts. If the text says the slave was lazy and bad, ask them whose perspective they think is being introduced as the default in the text. When a luxurious villa is presented as “The Roman House,” ask them whether that means the standard Roman house, help them explore why archaeology itself might tilt in favor of elite homes, and have them research digs that seek to balance this discrepancy. In an idiom like in matrimonium ducere, ask them to notice what gender is doing the action versus being acted upon. Encourage them to look for these unaddressed biases on their own and share them with the class.
- Many teachers are bound by their districts, administrators or parents to teach certain canonical authors. However, just because there’s a pressure to get through Cicero and Virgil doesn’t mean you can’t incorporate writing by women along the way. Explore Renaissance women’s letters as a way of showing the conventions of the epistolary genre, since they were often writing in imitation of Cicero. Take advantage of our countless examples of dactylic hexameter by women writers of the post-classical period if you want to teach a lesson on scanning meter. And finally, please share your own experiences and breakthroughs in teaching using these tools at conferences and in papers so that we can all benefit from your experiences.
5.Are there any resources you would recommend for Latin teachers to develop their understanding of these issues?
Absolutely. For understanding the exclusion of women’s writings in most Latin curricula, I recommend How to Suppress Women’s Writing by Jessa Crispin; Women Latin Poets by Jane Stevenson, and anything by the feminist theorist Gerda Lerner.
Another way to validate women’s Latin as literature is to include Medieval and Neo-Latin writers of any gender in your classes, as well as opening a question about what counts as “literature” versus “writing.” While it’s true that we have few examples of Latin literature by women from the ancient period, we do have funerary monuments, graffiti, letters, and election slogans by women. Furthermore, teaching later Latin is a key step in bringing more women writers into classrooms. Medieval Latin and Neo-Latin is rarely taught even in universities, which means fewer scholars work within those fields. Since it’s in these later periods that we see an explosion of women’s Latin texts, this all impacts the teaching of women’s voices in our classrooms.
To start with Neo-Latin, I recommend the I Tatti Renaissance Library series by Harvard University Press, which includes English on the facing page. Although not one edition of their series is by a woman Latin author, the volumes will help you feel more comfortable reading Latin of the period and serve as a helpful foundation for reading women’s writing. For Neo-Latin women’s writing, I highly recommend the multi-volume “Women Writing Latin” series by Laurie J. Churchill et al.
6.How would you like to see Classics teaching evolve and become more diverse and inclusive over the next generation?
My dream would be for the overall makeup of our field (especially its leaders: the department heads, conference speakers, podcasters, and textbook editors) to be more representative of the demographics of our overall society. Even in the lowest levels, Latin classes often look different than our schools and communities as a whole. All too often, it only gets more male and more white with every passing year. To get there, I think we absolutely have to own the damage that is still being done, and not speak about it as “historically” exclusive but currently exclusive. That doesn’t mean calling people out—it means providing resources, support, and as profound an investigation into our own shortcomings as into the shortcomings of others. I also think affinity groups are one way to get safety in numbers and make big change, while of course still forming partnerships across groups.
On an even more immediate level, I have three very achievable goals that I have been working toward. I can’t tackle them alone, so I earnestly implore your help and advocacy:
- Ensuring that we have at least one (ideally more!) text by a women Latinist listed in the Neo-Latin section of the very popular Latin Library website.
- Putting into the official language teaching standards of our state (in the USA) or district that every student by level 4 should have read at least one Latin sentence by a woman. That’s a very minimal goal, but it says something that we aren’t even mandating that. We can definitely ensure that and so much more for our students.
- Petitioning series such as I Tatti to include their first edition of a woman’s writing, thus countering the faulty assumption that Latin studies and women’s studies are mutually exclusive.
There’s plenty of work to be done, but after over two years of directing Lupercal, I can honestly say that the people I’ve met through this work have given me so much energy to address these challenges. It’s never too late to join this movement to improve our field!
Connect with Skye on Twitter at @LupercalLegit. You can learn more about Lupercal and how to get involved here.
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Nota bene! This piece on Lupercal with Skye Shirley is part of our Diversity and Inclusion in the Latin Classroom series. To learn more about the series, please visit the home page.
