The Role of Empires: Classics at UTM Marks 8 Years of Public Scholarship

This fall, the Classical Civilization Program presents the 2025 CaWT lecture and workshop under the theme “Connecting Places in Greek and Roman Antiquity: The Role of Empires.” The two-day event begins Thursday, October 2 at 5:15 p.m. in the Kaneff Rotunda, followed by an evening reception in the MN Grand Hall. On Friday, graduate students — and a few advanced undergraduates — will spend the day in a workshop with the guest speakers.

This year’s featured scholars are Dr. Carlos Noreña, a professor in the Department of History at UC Berkeley, and Dr. Kathryn Stevens, an associate professor in the Faculty of Classics at the University of Oxford. 

In anticipation of this event, we spoke with Classics professors and series founders Boris Chrubasik, Chair of Historical Studies, and Andreas Bendlin, Director of the Institute for the Study of University Pedagogy.

“When UTM turned 50 in 2017, the Classics program did too,” Chrubasik explains. “We wanted to celebrate and to reflect on how Classics has evolved over the years.”

The first CaWT celebration in 2017 brought together students, scholars, and the public to hear from leaders in the field on a current topic that would be meaningful to students and the wider community in the GTA and Peel Region. It was such a success, they made it an annual event.

Subsequent iterations have drawn large numbers from across the University and beyond, tackling topics such as religious violence; citizen strife and civil war; migration and global connections; diet, food, and consumption; and more. Given the current state of the news, this year’s theme, empires, promises to spark timely conversations. 

“We choose topics that help people connect the past to the present, to reflect on the present through the past,” says Bendlin. “Empires have always been a hot topic — not just in Classics, but across historical sciences.” 

(Unconvinced? If you haven’t seen the recent “What’s your Roman Empire?” trend on social media, you may want to refresh your feed.)

Bendlin notes that empires both enable and restrict the movement of people, ideas, and beliefs. “It’s both,” he says. “That tension is what makes the topic so rich.”

Talking about citizen strife and civil war in contemporary societies, for instance, is much more difficult than asking, ok, what is citizen strife? What is civil war? How did people handle these types of conflict in the past? And then draw your own conclusions about the contemporary world. — Andreas Bendlin

What did the emergence of empire in the Mediterranean world — such as the Hittites, the Egyptians, the Greeks, and the Romans — do to people in the ancient world? And what parallels can be drawn between the building, restructuring, and changemaking of ancient empires and twenty-first-century players like Russia, China, and the United States?

For this, the Classics program has invited two well-known international experts in the field: Noreña is a leading scholar of the Roman Empire, who focuses on the Latin-speaking Western empire and questions of law and language. Stevens' work bridges Babylonia and the Greek world, examining how empires enact and respond to change. 

“They both represent where the field is going,” says Chrubasik. “They’re methodologically aware and they also go beyond the traditional understanding of Classics as just being Greek or Roman. They recognize it as a more modern, open field of inquiry.”

Chrubasik and Bendlin anticipate a lively discussion.

“Many politicians now are paying lip service to some historical parallel with the ancient world, but those parallels are often uninformed and dangerous,” says Bendlin. “It’s important for us to clarify what is actually meaningful when comparing the ancient world and our time.” 

He wants the event to be a safe intellectual space where people can think about contemporary problems, and he points out that talking about something so removed can sometimes feel easier than looking at a problem in this time, this world. 

“Talking about citizen strife and civil war in contemporary societies, for instance, is much more difficult than asking, ok, what is citizen strife? What is civil war? How did people handle these types of conflict in the past? And then draw your own conclusions about the contemporary world,” he says.

Chrubasik agrees. 

“We focus on the ancient world because that’s our area of expertise,” he says. “But we really want to ask questions that have an impact on human lives. The relevance comes through the students and audience members making their own connections. The idea that people will leave this event and carry with them the spark of curiosity, that they’ll continue to ask questions and think outside the box — that’s the satisfying bit of it.”

The CaWT initiative has also helped shape the Classics program itself; it’s become a key part of the graduate experience and has inspired a more community-focused approach.

We focus on the ancient world because that’s our area of expertise. But we really want to ask questions that have an impact on human lives. The relevance comes through the students and audience members making their own connections. The idea that people will leave this event and carry with them the spark of curiosity — that’s the satisfying bit of it. — Boris Chrubasik

Each year, students and faculty gather to discuss emerging topics in the field. Historians and archaeologists alike highlight the latest research and explore how scholars are approaching new questions. The program also supports summer bursaries for undergraduates to study abroad — whether excavating in Greece, visiting Pompeii, or exploring museum collections in North America or Europe.

Next year, Prof. Carrie Atkins, an archeologist specializing in maritime networks, will launch a new fourth-year course: Classics in the World Today, an experiential learning opportunity inspired by the CaWT series. (You can read more about her work here.)

As the series enters its eighth year, Chrubasik and Bendlin are more committed than ever to its mission. They say that in light of current conversations about the role and relevance of universities and the humanities in particular, events such as this feel more important than ever. They help show why history matters — and why it should matter to more people outside the classroom.

“It goes beyond Classics,” says Bendlin. “I see our students walk away with a deeper understanding — maybe just for a moment, maybe longer than that — of why the humanities matter as a field of critical inquiry. It’s a space where you can ask questions and things start to make sense in ways they didn’t before.”

“That’s what we hope people can take away from these events. That they are a space where people can think critically about world events, past and present, and it all somehow comes together.”