La Vaughn Belle
La Vaughn Belle (she/her) makes visible the unremembered. She is a visual artist working in a variety of disciplines that include: video, performance, painting, installation, writing and public intervention projects. She explores the material culture of coloniality and her art presents countervisualities and narratives. Borrowing elements from history and archeology Belle creates narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. She has exhibited in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe in institutions such as the Museo del Barrio (NY), Casa de las Americas (Cuba), the Museum of the African Diaspora (CA) and Kunsthal Charlottenborg(DK) and recently finished a solo exhibition at the National Nordic Museum in Seattle. Her artwork has been featured in a wide range of media including: the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, The Guardian, Time magazine, Caribbean Beat, the BBC and Le Monde. Her work with colonial era pottery led to a commission with the renowned brand of porcelain products, the Royal Copenhagen. She is the co-creator of I Am Queen Mary, the artist-led groundbreaking monument that confronted the Danish colonial amnesia while commemorating the legacies of resistance of the African people who were brought to the former Danish West Indies. She holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba and an MA and a BA from Columbia University in NY. She was the 2018-2020 fellow at the Social Justice Institute at the Barnard Research Center for Women. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.
Amena Fadhil
Aminah Fadhil Jafaar AL-Bayati (she/her) is Director of the Iraqi Museum Library. She graduated with a BA, MA, and PhD in Archaeology, specializing in cuneiform studies, from the University of Baghdad, and has worked in the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage since 1992.
Amy Gansell
Amy Gansell (she/her) is Associate Professor of Art History and Coordinator of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at St. John’s University in Queens, New York. She holds a BA in Archaeology/Anthropology from Barnard College and an MA and PhD in the History of Art from Harvard University, where she wrote her dissertation on ideals of feminine beauty embodied in Levantine ivory sculptures. Dr. Gansell has received numerous grants and fellowships, including one from The Academic Research Institute in Iraq (TARII) and two from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Her articles have appeared in prestigious international journals including the Cambridge Archaeological Journal, Journal of Archaeological Science, and the American Journal of Archaeology. She has co-edited two books (CyberResearch on the Ancient Near East and Eastern Mediterranean [2018] and Testing the Canon of Ancient Near Eastern Art and Archaeology [2020]) and is currently finishing a monograph on ancient Assyrian queens. Website: http://amygansell.com/ Twitter: @amy_gansell
Shelley P. Haley
Shelley P. Haley (she/her) is the Edward North Chair of Classics Emerita at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York. Her BA is from Syracuse University where she earned a double major in Latin and Math. She received her PhD in Classical Studies from the University of Michigan.
Professor Haley served as Chief Reader for the AP Latin exam from 2000-2003, and as the Chair of the AP Latin Exam Development Committee from 2003-2007. She was honored as a Merita Award recipient at the American Classical League Institute in 2007; Hamilton College presented her with the Samuel and Helen Lang Excellence in Teaching Award in 2015. In 2017, The Society for Classical Studies awarded Professor Haley with their Excellence in Collegiate Teaching Award. She now serves as President of the Society, the first African-American woman to do so in the Society’s 152-year history.
Widely acclaimed as an expert on Cleopatra, Professor Haley’s current research centers on recovering the constructions of race and gender in ancient Rome by applying the theoretical framework of critical race feminist theory. She is also finishing a book on the role of Classics in the lives of college educated Black women in the 19th and early 20th century.
Jackie Murray
Jackie Murray (she/her) is Associate Professor of Classics and African American and Africana Studies in the Modern and Classical Languages, Literatures and Cultures Department at the University of Kentucky. Her areas of research are Hellenistic and Latin Poetry, Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity, and Black Classicisms, especially the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. She has published several important articles on various aspects of Hellenistic and Latin Poetry and Race and the Classics, most recently in 2020, “Quarrelling with Callimachus: A Response to Annette Harder’s Aspects of the Interaction between Apollonius Rhodius and Callimachus”, and in 2021 “Poetically Erect again: The female oriented dildo-humor in Herodas’ Mimiamb VI”, and “Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey” in Denise McCoskey, ed., Bloomsbury Cultural History of Race Series which should appear in print by the Fall. She is currently finishing up a monograph on Apollonius’ Argonautica, Νεῖκος: Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Poetics of Controversy under contract with Harvard University Press and a in the beginning stages of a monograph on Race and Racecraft in Ancient Epic as well as collaborating with Annette Harder on a text, translation and commentary of Apollonius’ Argonautica Book 1, with Rebecca Futo Kennedy on a textbook, Understanding Race in Antiquity for Routledge, with Kelly Dugan and Shelley Haley on An Anti-Racist Teaching Guide for Classics, and with Elena Giusti and Rosa Andújar the Cambridge Companion to Race and Classics.
Mrs. Smith
Mrs. Smith (she/her) is a philanthropist, cat lover, and the world’s most unlikely guitar hero. Kidnapped and held for ransom by a Norwegian Death Metal band and suffering the Stockholm Syndrome, she acquired otherworldly musical abilities which she uses to vent her lady-based grief and rage. She has performed in dive bars and prestigious venues across the globe including LifeBall in Vienna, St. Louis College of Music in Rome, Joe’s Pub at The Public Theater, Bowery Ballroom and appeared in spots for GUCCI with endorsements from MAC Cosmetics and Ibanez guitars.
“In performance, Mrs. Smith is a tornado of id, poking fun at her crowd and name-dropping celebrity “friends” like Jim Henson. But, because Mrs. Smith is a bleeding wound of wanting to belong, the persona also conveys a deeply rooted empathy for outsiders of all kinds.”
-Rolling Stone