Shadi Bartsch
Professor of Classics
Shadi Bartsch is scheduled to teach a course on the Roman philosopher Seneca this fall, but she almost didn’t make it to the first class. As she was ascending Mount Kilimanjaro in July, one of the climbers above her inadvertently bumped a large boulder. It careened down a rocky slope and hit her.
“My first thought was, I’m dead,” she said, “and my second was that Classics Department chair John Bodel is going to be so annoyed.” But in a deus ex machina of classical proportions, fate intervened. Bartsch’s on-the-back water carrier cushioned the blow. She escaped serious injury and made it to the summit.
She calls mountain climbing “a break” from her cerebral life. “It’s a good way to remind myself I can do something physically challenging, since I’ve had my nose in a book my whole life.”
As a child, Bartsch was captivated by a children’s version of The Odyssey given to her by her father. She studied Latin in high school and taught herself Greek on the side.
After an A.B. in classics from Princeton, she made a brief stop at Harvard, and went on to the University of California–Berkeley for an M.A. in Latin. Her Ph.D. in classics, also from Berkeley, placed her squarely in a field she says will require a lifetime of fascinating work. “There is a whole world at your fingertips. It’s the literature, the history, the art history. It’s the sociology — every aspect of the civilization that you could imagine is accessible to you if you are a classicist.”
Bartsch’s particular areas of expertise are Julio-Claudian Rome, the ancient novel, and the history of classical rhetoric, among others.
She honed her teaching skills at the University of Chicago, where she has spent 10 years, and earned two teaching awards and a Guggenheim fellowship.
Bartsch has authored four books on subjects ranging from Lucan’s civil war to sexuality in the early Roman Empire.
And she’s fluent in French and Farsi, in addition to being trained in Greek, Latin, Sanskrit and Hittite.
Despite these accomplishments, Bartsch admits that she often needs to do some public relations for her field. “A lot of people in the outside world think you are talking about the classics of Western literature and say, ‘I love Moby Dick’ or ‘I’ve always wanted to read Hamlet.’ Then you need to explain to them that what you mean by classics would seem to them actually fairly marginal — these ancient Greek and Roman fusty, musty texts, like Cicero and Plato and Homer.”
It’s an explanation she’s not expecting to make too often at Brown when she joins the Department of Classics as the W. Duncan MacMillan II Professor of Classics. She hopes to recruit students with her devotion to the ancient world.
“I don’t think the challenge and the excitement of actually plunking yourself down in that time 2,000 years ago should be underestimated.”
As for the non-cerebral excitement, she is planning to climb Aconcagua, a 22,000-foot peak in the southern Andes next winter. Please don’t tell John Bodel.