An Interview with Associate Professor James Chong-Gossard
SHAPS belatedly, if most cordially, congratulates James Chong-Gossard on his promotion to Associate Professor of Classics. James Harvey Kim On Chong-Gossard (affectionately known as K.O.) was born in Pennsylvania and raised in Ohio, went to grad school at the renowned University of Michigan and taught at Kalamazoo College, before migrating to Melbourne a little over twenty years ago. In addition to being an outstanding teacher of the Classics and the classical languages at all levels, K.O. is an expert in Greek tragedy, who has also conducted research in ancient drama more generally, and in Roman social history. He has also published on his Chinese American family in Hawaii. K.O. recently sat down to talk with Forum’s Ash Finn to talk about his career and interests in the field of Classics.
Can you tell me a little bit about your early career in the US?
Well, I grew up in Ohio and graduated with a BA in Latin in 1991 from Oberlin College, which is a small four-year liberal arts college. It only offered undergraduate programs for about 3,000 students and we were instilled with a very high work ethic. There were no fraternities or sororities and no cafés in those days, and the drinking age was 21, so there wasn’t much to do other than work late each night in the library.
I then moved to Michigan to undertake my graduate studies, which in the US are made up of coursework and independent research. For the first four years I had to do all sorts of coursework, such as compulsory Greek prose composition, Latin prose composition, the history of Greek literature (in two semesters), the history of Latin literature (in two semesters) and electives on classical texts including Greek tragedy, Herodotus, Plato, Hellenistic literature (Theocritus, Callimachus and Herodas), Propertius, Neronian literature (Petronius, Lucan, Seneca), Hippocratic medical texts, Christian hagiographical texts, and other things like Greek and Roman epigraphy and Roman social history. I even took a few breadth courses on Chinese language (both Mandarin and Literary Chinese).
I also had to pass nine compulsory exams. The first six were German and French translation, ancient Greek and Latin translation, and Greek and Roman history. Then there were three tailored exams: on a Greek author of my choice, a Latin author of my choice, and an ‘ancillary discipline’ such as archaeology, papyrology, numismatics, metrics, etc. I chose Euripides, Seneca’s tragedies and Roman prosopography.
At the same time, I began working as a Graduate Student Instructor, teaching tutorials for Michigan’s ‘Great Books Program’ for first-year undergraduates. Students would read Greek, Roman and medieval literature in English translation over two semesters, and I would guide them through it and assess all their written work. Their reading list included the entire Iliad and Odyssey, Aeschylus’s Oresteia, Sophocles’s Antigone, Euripides’s Medea and Bacchae, Aristophanes’s Acharnians and Clouds, Plato’s Apology, Symposium, and Republic, Virgil’s entire Aeneid, books from the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Job, the Gospel of Matthew, the Gospel of John, and the Book of Revelation), St Augustine’s Confessions, Dante’s Divine Comedy, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. And, in the process of teaching all of this, I got to know these texts pretty well myself.
So, after those first four years I was awarded an MA and then began work on a PhD thesis on gender and representation of women in Euripides’s tragedies, with Ruth Scodel as my supervisor. I was teaching the whole time I was researching my thesis – at first more of ‘Great Books’ and then, by the end, I switched to teaching beginners Latin.
Finally, in June 1999 I defended my thesis orally to the four members of my supervisory committee (all of them women, I should add) and graduated. That same summer I took one last subject at Michigan: a summer intensive beginners Russian class, since I figured, when else will I have the opportunity to do something like this?
After a tipoff from a friend, I applied for a fixed-term job teaching at Kalamazoo College (also in Michigan) – a liberal arts college with only about 1,500 students, it was even smaller than Oberlin. I was at Kalamazoo for one year and taught both Latin and ancient Greek, Classical Mythology, and two subjects designed by myself: Science and Medicine in the Ancient World and Mad Emperors of Rome (which was very popular). I then went back to the University of Michigan to teach Latin (both beginners and Virgil) for another year on a fixed-term contract.
How did the job at Melbourne come about?
It was at this time I went along to a conference about Euripides at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville where a doctoral student from Melbourne Uni informed me about a job opening at Melbourne. I would always recommend that postgraduates and young researchers go along to conferences, especially small, themed conferences, to meet the experts in their field and find out about various funding and job opportunities. It really is an invaluable experience to realise that there are other people in the world crazy enough like you to devote their lives to something like ancient world studies!
The job at Melbourne was for a Lecturer B in Classics, specifically to teach both ancient Greek and Latin, with a preference for expertise in Greek drama and a knowledge of the American scholarship on it. I applied, as did two of my friends (one from my own program at the University of Michigan, bizarrely enough), and, after an interview over the phone in November 2000, I was offered the job.
I’d thought during the interview that they would have asked me about my thesis and research but instead they asked about how I would teach certain subjects and how this would fit in with the rest of the school (at that time, it was the School of Fine Arts, Classical Studies and Archaeology (FACSA), which included Cinema Studies and Art History). We still use this process in interviews here today, and it’s one that I think attests to the focus on high quality teaching here for our undergraduates.
FACSA paid for me to visit Melbourne in January 2001, essentially to interview them. I remember it was 1° Celsius when I left Michigan, and it was 41° when I landed in Melbourne! Despite the weather, I loved Melbourne and I accepted the job offer soon thereafter, but couldn’t start for a few more months because I still had a semester to teach at Michigan.
So, in July 2001 after flying out to Melbourne, checking into a hotel for a week, and narrowly escaping death by tram (Parshia Lee-Stecum very kindly pulled me out of the way of an approaching tram as I was lolling about at the tram stop, not remembering what side of the road Aussies drive on …), I set about teaching Latin 2 and honours Ancient Greek, even before I had found a place to live.
Six months later I had my two cats flown to Australia and they spent a month in quarantine in Spotswood. Three years later, after I was ‘confirmed’ in my job, I got my partner (who was still living in Michigan) a partner visa and we have been here ever since.
Tell me about your current research projects.
Well, currently I’m coordinating a project funded by the ARC (Australian Research Council) on the Latin commentaries on Seneca’s tragedies by a monk named Nicholas Trevet, written in the early fourteenth century when there was a rebirth of interest in classical drama. I’m working alongside two other researchers based here at Melbourne Uni, Professor Emeritus Bernard Muir and Dr Andrew Turner.
We’re looking not only at Trevet’s commentary itself but also how that commentary survives decades later in manuscript copies that include illustrations of scenes from the plays and even astronomical charts. In general, one of our challenges is understanding how differently ancient drama was interpreted in the fourteenth century in comparison to today. For example, since Trevet was writing for a medieval Christian audience, did he look to tragedy as a showcase for ethical (or more likely unethical) behaviour?
Even more challenging, or should I say interesting, is trying to work out how Trevet made sense of Seneca’s plays given that he was using a different text of Seneca than what we use today. That is, various different manuscripts of Seneca all have slightly different versions of the text. We know that Trevet based his commentary on only one manuscript of Seneca but it’s quite different to the text that we currently find in Loeb or Teubner or Oxford Classical Texts editions, which are the basis for the most recent English translations of Seneca. This is one of the key fundamental aspects of classical studies: there’s lots of different versions of any text and, in the case of Seneca’s plays, the text that Trevet was commenting on has different words and phrases, missing lines and, occasionally, completely different endings from the version of the plays that we know now.
You’ve also recently published work on Greek tragedy.
Yes, most of my work to date has been on Greek tragedy and, in particular, questions surrounding gender and the representation of women in Euripides’s tragedies. I co-wrote an article with my former fourth-year honours student, Lin Li Ng, on internalised misogyny in three Euripidean plays in a Festschrift for my PhD supervisor, published in 2018.
I was also invited to contribute a chapter to a book, published in 2020, about women in fragmentary Greek tragedies. There are a number of incomplete tragedies known only from quotations in other works and various papyri findings. My chapter was on Euripides’s fragmentary Hypsipyle, and I initially approached it with the question: what exactly was the plot? And then I tried to examine how women are represented in this plot—in fact, how they create or instigate the plot—and how this relates to Euripides’ other, complete works.
I also wrote an article on the beginning of Euripides’s Hypsipyle for the Australasian journal Antichthon, published in 2019. The study of fragments is, to an extent, the study of new material – new by the standards of Classics, anyway. Plays that survive in fragments can seem like new plays that we didn’t know about before and haven’t been studied as deeply as the full ones that have survived.
What do you think the role is of Classics today, or rather why should you, I, or anybody study it?
First and foremost, I believe that when considering what degree or major or specialisation to take, we should consider what it is we enjoy doing. For me, I have always enjoyed reading these ancient texts. To study what makes us happy allows us to get much more out of the experience; it brings a certain sense of satisfaction, and humans ought to do what makes them happy. A quite philosophical point, I’ll admit. Yet I have lots of mature students (say, ages 40–70) who come to Melbourne just to study one or two subjects, and they tell me they do it because they always wanted to learn something like ancient Greek but never did, and they’re so happy to be finally able to. I’d hate to look back at my time at university and think that I didn’t do what made me happy, or at least didn’t try to.
Second, if you’re looking for a practical role for Classics, there are the skillsets of problem solving and improving communication, that come from taking the rules of a language and then learning all the exceptions, confronting the text and working out how to solve it. There’s nothing quite like reading a text in the original language and moving with the flow of the text, and trying to understand the cultural implications and contexts of that text. This kind of problem-solving works both with ancient and modern languages and cultures, and teaches us better communication skills. And that’s important!
As well as teaching undergraduate courses, you also supervise several postgraduate projects. Can you tell me a little about them?
I’m the principal supervisor for PhD theses in Classics on such topics as: internal misogyny and philogyny in Greek drama; women from the Trojan war cycle in post-Homeric Greek authors (such as Sappho, Euripides and Lycophron); and rape and sexual violence in Latin rhetorical texts. And I’m the principal supervisor for MA theses in Classics on: the textual criticism of Greek tragedy; gender in Ovid’s exile poetry; and Hellenistic athletic competitions and their connection to the diplomatic granting of ‘inviolability’ between city-states.
You do also have two other particular passions; would you like to talk about them?
I do. I have a collection of around 250 teddy bears. At least 100 of them are in my office, and quite a few are from former students. Whenever I travel to a conference or research trip, I always buy at least one new bear as a memento, so you’ll find lots of bears in my office from universities in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. I also have bears from various Melburnian secondary schools where I have given talks.
I also own two lovely cats: Otto (a 13-year-old Turkish van) and Henry (an eight-year-old ginger tom), both of them adopted from the Lost Dogs Home in North Melbourne. And they both have their own Facebook pages!
Finally, let’s say you end up stranded on a desert island and you can only take one ancient text. What’s it going to be?
I’d take the OCT (Oxford Classical Texts) of Euripides’s plays, either Vol. 1 or 2, or ideally all three volumes. Just simply reading the original Greek has gotten me through many a long-haul flight over the Pacific, which is perhaps the closest thing to being on a desert island. I find reading Greek very relaxing.