In the past 10 years, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion as a social concept has risen to the highest levels of institutionalization under the Obama and Biden administrations, as well as in higher education and corporate settings. It has been seen as a crucial corrective to the long history of institutional racism that has plagued our country from even before its founding. DEI has also been raised up by political and cultural conservatives as the central target of their efforts to wage a culture war against liberal “wokeness” in order to preserve the traditional history and culture of the United States. Understanding what constitutes “Diversity” and “Inclusion” seems fairly straightforward, but what about “Equity”? In this episode of The Future of the Past Lab, we talk with Dr. Charles McNamara from the University of Minnesota whose new book, Learning to Be Fair explores the concept of “Equity” from classical philosophy to contemporary politics. We discover the surprising fluidity of this concept through the ages and how key figures in our country’s history grappled with the legal and cultural weight of Equity long before it became a buzzword in out contemporary culture wars.

When the eras of history are re-examined from multiple perspectives, we can begin to see that the boundaries of eras, not to mention the generally accepted names of them, are not so clear. Today, we are talking with Young Kim from the University of Illinois Chicago whose work examines Cyprus of the fifth and sixth centuries as a case study in the transition from so-called Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages. Is the line between these eras so clear as once thought? How does the examination of events of this time and place from different perspectives affect our understanding of the transition to the Middle Ages? Was this transition even a transition or can we characterize this time period more accurately by looking at the evidence differently? Dr. Kim will help us explore these questions for Cyprus but also help us interrogate more widely the ways that the past is reconstructed in all eras. Visit futureofthepastlab.com for information about our program, our blog and links to future and past events.

A conversation with Anna Rosensweig from the University of Rochester who shares with us her latest work on how Christian Nationalists and QAnon conspiracists in the US are currently mobilizing texts, images, and ideas from the sixteenth-century Wars of Religion in France. Visit futureofthepastlab.com for information about our program, our blog and links to future and past events.

Ancient Egypt continues to fascinate, as it has for hundreds of years now. Museums hold pride of place when it comes to the mechanism by which many people encounter ancient Egypt, whether it be through modern art that uses Egyptian motifs or by the careful display of actual artifacts from ancient Egypt for museum-goers to encounter. Exhibitions featuring Egyptian artifacts are often the gem of ancient museum collections, but the curation and exhibition of these artifacts are contested spaces, often created to shape the experience of museum-goers in subtle ways. With a PhD in art history and an MFA in curation, our guest, Dr. Rachel Kreiter from Vanderbilt University Museum, helps us unpack the curation and exhibition of ancient Egyptian art and artifacts in museums. Dr. Kreiter helps us to understand the sometimes subtle, sometimes provocative exhibition of ancient Egyptian art in museums, how we might distinguish between art objects and religious objects, and why understanding ancient art history matters when it comes to creating museum exhibitions.