Global Antiquity empowers students and alumni to enrich the present by looking to the past

While studying a Minor in Global Antiquity at Yale-NUS College might, at first, seem an unusual pursuit, students and alumni have regularly found connections between the past and present that enrich their own educational experience and, in some cases, enable them to make valuable contributions to contemporary society.

For instance, alumna Pei Yun Chia (Class of 2017) has found herself involved in a project to translate the Latin works of the Roman poet Ovid into Chinese.

“I graduated before the Global Antiquity minor even formally existed,” she shared. Led by her interests in the world of antiquity, Pei Yun studied Classical Chinese, advanced Latin, and wrote her Literature capstone on a section of Ovid’s poem Fasti. “Being in contact with antiquity opened up my worldview,” she added.

Indeed, Pei Yun’s unique educational background opened up an incredible opportunity for her. In 2017, the bimillennial of Ovid’s death, she joined the Ovid in China translation project led by Professor Jinyu Liu (DePauw University) and supported by a grant from the Chinese government. She then spent two years working on an annotated translation of Ovid’s Medicamina Faciei Femineae (on women’s face cosmetics), which has been published in a Chinese-language journal and on the open-source Dickinson College Commentaries. Her reflections on the process and the study of global antiquity at Yale-NUS have also formed the basis for a paper she co-authored with Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature) Steven Green, which is set to be published by Brill as part of a volume of essays.

Pei Yun (back row, third from left) and Assoc Prof Green (front row, first from right) gave a joint presentation at the CA/FIEC (Classical Association/ Fédération internationale des associations d’études Classique) conference in London in 2019, as part of an ‘Ovid in China’ panel. Image provided by the Global Antiquity Minor.

The Global Antiquity minor offers students an opportunity to craft an individualised course of study on ancient societies, the development of classical traditions, and their continuing cultural significance.

As the study of antiquity requires an interdisciplinary array of scholarly approaches to interpret the extant fragmentary sources (textual and material), students are required to gain a strong foundation in ancient languages to engage with cultures in their own linguistic form. Students of Global Antiquity take up at least one ancient language – such as Latin, Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, or Classical Chinese – to an academically advanced level.

Students like Violet Jordan Hara (Class of 2022), a Literature major, have enjoyed the opportunities afforded to them to study a range of ancient languages that are not typically found in other educational institutions in Singapore.

“I like the effective way ancient languages are taught at Yale-NUS. Our professors are highly supportive and really want you to succeed,” said Violet, who has studied both Ancient Greek and Latin to an intermediate level.

In designing a course of study, students are encouraged to seek unexpected connections across regions and periods, to think historically, and to view antiquity as dynamically transforming and globally interconnected through multiple forms of intercultural contact.

One way in which this takes place is the similarities between languages in different times and spaces. “I think it’s interesting to see connections between modern and ancient languages. I remember one of the exercises we did in Beginning Ancient Greek was to read an English passage and identify which words had Greek origins,” Violet said.

“I think people don’t realise how near the world of antiquity is to us. Sure, they had very different lives to us, but the human impulses that underlie their lives are also very close to us,” Pei Yun said. “For me, it really came through in the first advanced language class that I did, which was about the poetry of Catullus. He was full of feelings, seriously. He often wrote poetry that expressed a sense of longing and romantic emotion that is very recognisable even to modern sensibilities,” she excitedly explained.

Beyond the study of ancient languages, students pursuing the Global Antiquity minor will also take several other topical courses on the ancient world. These combinations of courses are designed to be interdisciplinary and diverse, often encompassing a range of modules from different majors including Philosophy, Literature, and History.

“This means that I have many options to choose from to meet the requirements,” said Simren Sambhi (Class of 2022), a Philosophy major. “For example, I’ve done classes on Roman history and classical Indian philosophy of language—both of these modules are considered part of the Global Antiquity minor.”

But even before taking these courses, the College exposes all students to a range of ancient texts and cultures through the Common Curriculum modules Literature and Humanities 1 (LH1) and Philosophy and Political Thought 1 (PPT1).

When Simren read the Indian Epic text the Bhagavad Gita in PPT1, she was inspired to learn Sanskrit, and has since studied the language to an advanced level. She is currently writing her Philosophy capstone on the text. “My knowledge of Sanskrit has come in extremely useful with the writing process,” she added.

Other times, some students have found themselves working much closer to home than many would initially think. For Nicholas Lua (Class of 2019), his exposure to antiquity opened brand new avenues towards his own research interests in the Southeast Asian region.

After picking up Latin, Nicholas began to realise how closely linked the ancient world really was. In his second year, Nicholas took another course on Asian religions that then inspired him to pick up Sanskrit. “It turns out that because they’re both in the same language family, learning one actually helps you with the other,” he explained. “The same categories in Latin grammar are helpful for Sanskrit, and they sort of feed into each other. And I think that’s the ‘global’ aspect of antiquity coming in.”

Nicholas is now working on his Master’s degree in History at Nanyang Technological University, where he researches Esoteric Buddhist material culture in Southeast Asia. Sure enough, his educational background in antiquity has never been far out of sight.

Nicholas poses beside a 13th-century Sumatran statue at Jakarta’s National Museum of Indonesia, while conducting field research for his History capstone on Esoteric Buddhism in Ancient Southeast Asia (6-14th c. CE). Image provided by Nicholas Lua.

“I still do a lot of translation work, bringing in the languages I began studying at Yale-NUS,” he explained. “I guess the approach hasn’t really changed, in that I’m still interested in learning how these ancient languages can tell us something about the world.” Even Latin, a non-Asian language, has enabled researchers like Nicholas to discover new insights about local and regional histories.

“You start to see these British administrators in colonial Malaya reading Latin texts and drawing connections between the world of ancient Rome and the Malayan and Singaporean landscape,” Nicholas explains.

Lately, Nicholas has worked on a translation of a Latin poem composed by the British schoolmaster L.A.S. Jermyn in British Malaya while he was a prisoner of war in Singapore during WWII (The Singing Farmer: A Translation of Vergil’s Georgics).

“Somehow, reading all these texts makes us very conscious of how the ancient world speaks to very broad, very universal experiences across space and time,” he added.