MA Dissertation Presentations

by thesemomentsofbeing

Over the past two weeks each of my MA coursemates and I rounded the last bend of the track on our way to the MA degree. Having presented our dissertation projects to faculty and fellow postgraduate students, we are now free for the summer to go forth, research, and write up.

For us presenters it was a big affair to prepare for. Our presentations were scheduled on four days spread out over two weeks—the same schedule, I would add, as Andrew Feldherr’s recent Bristol-Blackwell lectures on Sallust. Quite some shoes to fill: if you missed it, take a look at Professor Feldherr’s programme and watch the Institute’s webpage for forthcoming recordings of the lectures.

What our ten-minute presentations might have lacked in depth and subtlety we made up with a sheer diversity of topics. This summer, Bristol MA students in Classics & Ancient History and Classical Reception are:

searching for missing Roman legions;

revisiting the Black Athena debate (see the NY Times’s obituary of author Martin Bernal from last year);

exploring the spaces within and constituting memory in Roman literature and material culture;

exploring collection as a mode of reception through Sir John Soane’s Museum;

asking whether our economic theories that have guided us into financial disasters ought to be used to model ancient
economies;

and much more.

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To discover one’s own academic timbre, tone, or voice: that is, on reflection, perhaps the grand aim of the MA course as I have experienced it. I am using the word ‘voice’ here as a stand-in for the Latin word vox, which is one of those delightful words that seem to expand the further one swims in the lexicon. Vox can mean the voice as the medium of utterance or cry or shout for both humans and other animals. It can also name the quality of that sound: accent, pitch, timbre. But, in a magnificent way, vox reaches beyond the medium of sound to name also the things uttered in the medium of vox: a word is a vox, a bon mot is a vox. Vox is how you speak, what you say, and how you say it: and I can say quite clearly that Bristol’s MA programme has encouraged and equipped me to fashion and hone several voces in the course of the taught component.

Listening to my coursemates’ presentations I could not but hear their inflections of the ideas and texts we all explored together last fall term in the core unit ‘Theories & Approaches’. We took the ‘approach’ of the course’s title seriously. What are we—students of the histories, literatures, material-visual cultures, and societies of the ancient Mediterranean world— approaching in our studies? Something a text from the past meant at the time of its production? at a specific point of its reception? at this point of reception? And what is or should be the aim of scholarship in classics: to invent or to discover meaning? Or, again, reflecting on our Latin vocabulary, is it impossible to separate invention from discovery, invenio from invenio?

After listening to everyone’s presentations, I know now that we are each answering these questions in different ways. Some of us are firmly historically-minded, looking to contribute or modify knowledge in our narrative of antiquity; others of us are firmly interpretivist, interested in how perceptions of the past change over time and are shaped by present pressures; still others of us seem to want new research paradigms that mediate between these positions or create alternate modes of understanding the relationship between past and present.

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To wrap up, I’ll share a brief anecdote from my own presentation. This summer, I will be working on how Tacitus’s Agricola and W. G. Sebald converse with each other in their shared space, Britain, about the relationship between individuals, memory, space, and time, and death. (If you haven’t read Sebald, I’d recommend reading his obituary in the Guardian–yes, another obituary–written upon Sebald’s death in 2001. Then read The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, The Emigrants, etc.) In the Q&A after my talk, Professor Neville Morley asked why I had avoided or simply had not used the term ‘history’ in my discussion of Tacitus and Sebald. For me, that question was worth all my preparation. My choice of vocabulary, I now know, stands out in its absence of ‘history’: what are the benefits and what are the gains about not speaking about ‘history’ in analyzing two texts that are themselves so often wrapped up in debates about what history is or should be?

Armed with new questions, we are off. Keep up with the blog to find out what we do this summer.

–Brett