The APA

Just back from the APA Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, where I organized a panel sponsored by the Committee on the Status of Women and Minority Groups (CSWMG, fondly pronounced "Sea-swimming") that followed a format new to the American Philological Association.  What is the APA?  The answer displays the stunning diversity of the field we tend to refer to with the shorthand "Classics."  The APA is the professional association in North America for classicists (a label that formally implies concentration on ancient literature but that also is used by synecdoche to describe the whole field), ancient historians (who may focus on politics, military history, social history, gender, or the economy, to name a few), archaeologists, epigraphers (experts on stone or metal inscriptions), papyrologists (who study the usually tattered remains of texts written on papyri and other soft materials), numismatists (scholars of coins), art historians, ancient philosophers who may also belong to the "philosophical" APA -- and anyone else connected with the study of the literature, history, thought, culture, religion, and art of the ancient Mediterranean world.  But the APA also includes scholars who study what is sometimes called "classical reception" or "the classical tradition," that is, the impact of Greek and Roman thought, literature, and art on later periods, up to and including the contemporary world.  And I still haven't captured the whole picture, because the APA also makes space for people who work on societies like Egypt or Persia that neighbor the ancient Mediterranean, who might be housed in their universities in departments of Near Eastern Studies or Anthropology.
The APA Annual Meeting brings hundreds of these people together to listen to scholarly papers, hold job interviews (see my post below on job-hunting), meet with editors, browse the huge book displays run mostly by university presses, and schmooze.  The schmoozing is facilitated in the Philadelphia Marriott by the so-called "circle bar" in the central lobby of the hotel, where most of us are tempted to drink far too many martinis far too late into the night.  
For my panel, I borrowed a format used by the philosophical APA: "Authors Meet Critics." The CSWMG chose two recent outstanding books on the reception, or to use the panel's preferred term, the engagement of African-American and Caribbean writers with classical literature, Emily Greenwood's Afro-Greeks and Jim Tatum's African American Writers and Classical Tradition (co-authored with Bill Cook).  Four critics responded to the books: Simon Goldhill (Cambridge), Patrice Rankine (Purdue), Sydnor Roy (Temple), and Cornel West (Princeton).  More on the panel in a few.