James McGlew
Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies
Education: Ph.D., University of Chicago
Interests: Greek Political Culture.
Contact: mcglewj@missouri.edu
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I joined Classical Studies at the University of Missouri-Columbia in 2004. Since I received my Masters and PhD from the University of Chicago too many years ago to remember, I have taught at a wide array of colleges, most recently Iowa State University, my academic home since 1995.
My scholarship focuses on Greek political culture in the archaic and classical periods. I am interested in exploring the political world as a realm of debate and dissent, where social and economic interests are interpreted and individual and collective identities negotiated. My first book, Tyranny and Political Culture in Ancient Greece (1993), focused on the dynamic moments of the rise and fall of tyrants in the Archaic Age (7th & 6th c. B.C.E.). Examining these as discursive history, I argued that tyrants characteristically represented themselves as agents of justice. My hope was to show that the language of reform gave tyrants unprecedented political freedom but also marked their powers as temporary. Tyranny took shape, therefore, through a kind of discursive complicity between the tyrant and his subjects, who were persuaded by his self-representation but also learned from him a language and method of political resistance. My second book, Citizens on Stage studies the political constructions of public and private life in the late 5th and early 4th c. B.C.E. Athens, a period in which the still young Athenian democracy underwent several very important changes. I claim that the period saw the emergence of new ideas of political participation - some supportive of democracy, others (in varying degrees) hostile - that were particularly significant in reshaping images of citizenship.
I am now taking the first steps towards a new book (very provisionally entitled, Adventures on Spaceship Athens). This book will explore the concept and practice of citizen equality beginning in the late 6th and 5th c. Athenian democracy. My focus will be Athenians' interactions with their neighbors and friends, how citizenship engaged the imagination of the Athenian, his sense of himself and his fellows, his understanding of the real and mythical worlds. I will look closely at the distinct spaces of the symposium and theater to see how Athenians, as nascent citizens, negotiated the status and demands of political equality in an unequal society.
Citizens on Stage
2002
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