Classics Speaker Series: Curtis Dozier

The Challenge of White Nationalism to Classics Today

Eight years after demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia chanted “Jews will not replace us!” at a rally whose promotional poster featured the acronym SPQR and where one group of activists carried shields emblazoned with images of the Roman fasces, most Classical scholars are aware that white nationalists and other hateful actors take inspiration from Greco-Roman antiquity. There is less consensus, however, about what this phenomenon means for those of us who research and teach about the ancient Greco-Roman world. In this lecture Curtis Dozier, author of The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale University Press, 2026), draws on his ten years’ experience documenting appropriations of Greco-Roman antiquity by hate groups to bring into focus what white nationalist classicism reveals about the material we study, our discipline, our nation, and ourselves.