James Calvin Taylor is Assistant Professor of Classics at Colby College, where he also teaches courses in the Environmental Humanities. He received his PhD in Classical Philology from Harvard in 2020 with a dissertation on the conceptualization of deep time, geological processes, and environmental change in classical texts. His research interests span a wide variety of genres and time periods in classical antiquity, embracing texts as diverse as Aristotle’s Meteorologica and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and drawing upon interpretative frameworks from the history of science, environmental criticism, and the philosophy of history. He has written articles on topics as diverse as Lucan’s description of the Syrtes, Herodotus’ integration of Egypt’s geological and human histories, and the significance of tides in Stoic meteorology.
His current monograph project is tentatively titled Time’s Abyss: Geological Processes and Deep Time in Ancient Greek Prose. This book investigates how the observation of geological processes led ancient Greek philosophers and historians to imagine much deeper timescales than those made possible by the shallow reach of recorded history and collective memory, and the intellectual problems that these deeper timescales raised in classical thought.
Esteban Crespo’s research and teaching focus on 15th-, 16th-, and 17th-century Iberian cultures and literatures. His research explores gender, desire, race, and sexuality in relation to the history of the book, contemporary critical thought, and colonial studies. His current book project, Queer Pleasures: Constructing Early Modern Dissident Sexual Cultures, analyzes the presence of sexual and gender variance in the Iberian Peninsula and the viceroyalties of Mexico and Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
This project argues, on the one hand, that early modern Iberian cultures incorporated dissident sexualities and gender variance in richer, more quotidian ways than only through policing systems, including mainstream culture. On the other, it demonstrates that such ways were ubiquitous and coterminous on both sides of the Atlantic. Before joining Boston College, Dr. Crespo has taught at Boston University and has held fellowships at Harvard University (Houghton Library), Brown University (John Carter Brown Library) and the Folger Memorial Library.
Jerusalem Demsas is the Editor-in-Chief of The Argument, a magazine dedicated to revitalizing liberalism through public debate. The Argument takes on illiberalism left, right, and center through policy journalism, original issue polling, and a prominent debate podcast with Slow Boring’s Matthew Yglesias. Before founding The Argument, Demsas was a staff writer at The Atlantic where she created and co-hosted the podcast Good on Paper. Her work has spanned such issues as housing, labor economics, race, gender, and the politics of exclusion. Demsas is the co-author of “On the Housing Crisis: Land, Development, and Democracy.” She previously wrote for Vox as a policy journalist and co-hosted “The Weeds.”
Organized by the Goldfarb Center for Public Affairs with support from the Center for the Arts and Humanities.
In a future where a failed climate change experiment has killed all life except for the survivors who boarded the Snowpiercer (a train that travels around the globe), a new class system emerges.
Sponsored by the Center for the Arts and Humanities.