To Cut Up Nightingales

What Makes an American Classicist?

Abstract

If the American “classic” is involved in the dynamic of canons, value, and style, then what is the role of Classics as a field, and of the professional classicist? I argue that with the emergence of the professional classicist came significant anxiety, particularly regarding the transformative and unsettling consequences of specialist research. By discussing ostensibly established classicists like Basil Gildersleeve or Paul Shorey alongside Helen Magill, the first American woman to receive a PhD in Classics, I aim to destabilize the center of what establishment may or may not have meant in light of a shared, unsettled preoccupation with what a professional approach to a canon and a classic could be and ought to be.