Magisterial Feminae: How Women Who Studied the Ancient World Innovated Brooklyn College, the Latin/Greek Institute, and Beyond

Drawing upon the rich resources of the Brooklyn College Archives and Special Collections, History professor Lauren Mancia and Director of the Latin/Greek Institute Lucas Rubin have curated an exhibit that will open in the Brooklyn College Library on May 2, 2023:

Magisterial Feminae: How Women Who Studied the Ancient World Innovated Brooklyn College, the Latin Greek Institute, and Beyond

With help from the Kurz Undergraduate Research Assistantship program (and the Associate Archivist Marianne LaBatto), 10 student researchers from the History and Classics Departments have helped Mancia and Rubin build the exhibit. The exhibit focuses on BC female faculty members from 1930-1980, their contributions to the study of the pre-modern world, their teaching legacies, their service to the college, and the lasting institutional structures dedicated to the study of the humanities and the premodern that they helped create—namely, the Women & Gender Studies Program, the Latin Greek Institute, the Brooklyn College Core Curriculum, and the Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities. These women overcame many obstacles as they sought to be taken seriously at time when female faculty were regularly discriminated against in the academy.

Tours of the exhibit will be given during the HSS Expo and Faculty Day, and the exhibit will be on display through December, 2023.  If you do not have a CUNY-issued ID, you may present a government-issued photo ID at any Brooklyn College campus entrance and receive a visitor’s pass which allows access to the first floor of the Brooklyn College Library and the exhibition.

A digital version of the exhibit can be viewed on the Library website.

For more information, e-mail laurenmancia@brooklyn.cuny.edu.

Supporting groups: Brooklyn College Archives, Late Antique-Medieval-Early Modern Faculty Working Group (LAMEM), Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Library, History, Classics, Latin/Greek Institute, Anthropology.