The Dark History of UChicago Quizbowl

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Tees-Exe Line
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The Dark History of UChicago Quizbowl

Post by Tees-Exe Line »

On May 17th, 2012, the University of Chicago staged a vanity quizbowl match between a team of undergraduates, led by Shantanu Jha, and a "faculty" team consisting of me, Professor Rachel Fulton Brown, and two others. I was not, by any stretch of the imagination, on the faculty of the University of Chicago at that time, nor have I ever been, but I sought out a spot on that team in order to dish out one final humiliation to Shantanu, who had attempted to cheat at the ICT a few months earlier and been struck off the team as a result.

We won, in part thanks to Prof. Brown's deep knowledge of the history of the University of Chicago.

I bring this up now because it turns out that she has been in league with Milo Yiannopoulos.
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I regret to inform the world that the University of Chicago was unable to field an entire quizbowl team that evening free of moral taint, but alas, it's true.
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Re: The Dark History of UChicago Quizbowl

Post by The King's Flight to the Scots »

Has Classics been infested with the same kind of white supremacist stuff as medievalism?
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Re: The Dark History of UChicago Quizbowl

Post by Perturbed Secretary Bird »

From what I've heard, she's considered a medievalist (source: medieval lit professor and medieval art history grad student). There is a movement within medievalism to push back against all of that, though. It's not all white supremacists. The field does attract them like no other, though.
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Re: The Dark History of UChicago Quizbowl

Post by Susan »

I don't know how much weird white supremacist stuff is coming from within classics, but classicists are certainly having to put up with some nonsense (where by "nonsense" I mean "death threats") from the white supremacist general public these days; see the reaction to Sarah Bond's really interesting article on polychromy in classical sculpture (which I think I saw on Mik Larsen's Facebook page, so thanks, Mik!).

Fulton Brown has been an odd duck for a while and has gotten pretty alarming in the past few years, but medieval studies definitely has its share of charmers.
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Re: The Dark History of UChicago Quizbowl

Post by Muriel Axon »

Susan wrote:I don't know how much weird white supremacist stuff is coming from within classics, but classicists are certainly having to put up with some nonsense (where by "nonsense" I mean "death threats") from the white supremacist general public these days; see the reaction to Sarah Bond's really interesting article on polychromy in classical sculpture (which I think I saw on Mik Larsen's Facebook page, so thanks, Mik!).
Mary Beard got a huge amount of blowback from the alt-right -- and Nassim Taleb -- on Twitter for defending a BBC video that (correctly) depicted Roman Britain as a place where people of different ethnicities, including dark-skinned people, coexisted.
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Re: The Dark History of UChicago Quizbowl

Post by rylltraka »

While I do not have Argus-like panoptic knowledge of the entire Classics community, the impression that I have is that, despite a few weird outliers that shall not be named here, and a vast quantity of the field whose interests are simply too esoteric to ever be political, Classics and Ancient History as a whole, despite the implied conservatism of the discipline, are about as politically liberal and inclusive as a whole as any university field that isn't inherently political by nature.

Also, for examples of Classics work that exists in direct opposition to this kind of rhetoric, it's worth sifting through the online journal Susan cited, Eidolon, which showcases politically conscious, hot-off-the-presses topics from a scholarly, often reception-heavy, angle.
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