Presented by Curtis Dozier, Assistant Professor of Greek and Roman Studies, Vassar College

Although the appearance of Spartan-style helmets at the January 6th Capitol Insurrection may strike the casual observer as ill-informed or superficial, such high-profile examples of white nationalist classicism draw inspiration from a much more sophisticated intellectual ecosystem that Political Scientists have described as “the intellectual radical right.” In this lecture, Dr. Dozier examines how the practitioners of this “highbrow white nationalism” analyze the Persian Wars in order to illustrate what the study of overtly white nationalist receptions of the Persian Wars can contribute to scholarly debates about Greek attitudes toward the “barbarian,” as well as to our understanding of the historical complicity of Classical Studies in white supremacy.

Curtis Dozier is the director of Pharos: Doing Justices to the Classics, an internationally recognized website that documents appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups online. His book on the ways that white nationalists use the Greco-Roman past to legitimize their hateful politics is forthcoming from Yale University Press.