Princeton Classics is proud to announce that our program’s latest graduate, Dr. Jermaine Bryant, has been appointed to the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. As a Junior Fellow in Classics and African Studies, he will enjoy the Society’s support for a three-year term of self-directed research and writing.

“Jermaine is a world builder, seeking insights from other world builders,” said Bryant’s co-advisor, Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta. “Jermaine’s combination of intellectual magnetism and generosity of spirit has transformed our departmental community. From our first conversations, I’ve marveled not just at the sweep of his interests but at his drive to engage and embrace others in uplifting conversation about them.” 

Prof. Andrew Feldherr, who also co-advised Bryant’s dissertation, “Roman Post-Triumviral Elegy and the Rhetoric of Trauma,” further noted its “commitment to finding a way of reading that will link the literature he studies to lived experience, both those of its Roman contemporaries and our own, and for its sustained engagement with the fascinating complexities of Roman elegy.” 

Bryant joins a small body of Latinists ever to have been named to the Society, one of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious postdoctoral positions. Among the handful still living are this year’s Prentice Lecturer, Ellen Oliensis, and one of Bryant’s teachers at Princeton Classics, emeritus professor Denis Feeney. 

“I was overjoyed that the Harvard Society of Fellows extended him an offer,” said Padilla Peralta. “They will have the privilege of witnessing him in action as he embarks on the next steps of what will be an exceptional career, in and beyond the field.” 

To better understand those next steps, we sat down with Dr. Bryant to discuss past and future projects, and the classics journey that brought him there.

First thing’s first, congratulations! Can you tell us a bit about this position?

So in December, the Harvard Society of Fellows offered me a Junior Fellowship to work in Classics and African Studies. It’s essentially a three-year position that offers complete intellectual freedom to work on whatever project you want. People usually either spend their time researching and writing, but you also have the freedom to retrain in a different discipline if you would like. In my case, I'll be working on two projects. 

And they are?

The first will be making a monograph out of my dissertation, which was on Latin elegy and discourses of “trauma.” Basically, my dissertation deals with how in the late first century BC, following the civil wars with the triumvirs and Octavian and Antony, the Romans begin developing discourses, aesthetics, poetics, and ethics that deal with the lasting effects of negative emotional experience. And I argue that the elegies of Propertius and Tibullus become a site, perhaps the premier poetic site, for Roman authors to work out some of these problems about what it means to have this unhealing, invisible emotional wound. My contention is that although the wound they primarily talk about is the erotic one that forms the basis of the genre, this state of “woundedness” creates a sort of emotional vehicle for them to talk about other kinds of persisting emotional pains, specifically the ones that are aggravated by the events in and resulting from the recent civil wars.

Would it be accurate to say that, perhaps even to an unusual degree, this project lies at the intersection of literature, history, and theory? 

Sure, I think that’s fair. But that’s the nature of the topic. Across the humanities and social sciences, there's been increased attention to this thing we call trauma, and because of the seemingly inexhaustible capacity for negative experience to affect the way people tell stories, define themselves, organize into groups, and conceive of a future: trauma has this strange power to pervade everything. I would actually say this power makes it quite dangerous as a concept. I think we've seen a lot of the dangers of its overuse. On TikTok you can see examples of how pretty much any maladaptive behavior can be read by some people as a trauma response. And then there are endless discussions of trauma-informed activism, trauma-informed parenting, trauma-informed pedagogy. It's everywhere. And what's interesting is that although the word keeps popping up, it's not always clear what people are talking about, whether this is firmly medical, whether it's a more metaphorical use, or historical or sociological. Can you just talk about any negative experience as trauma? Are there limits on that? What happens when we don't put limits on that? These are the dangers that I'm specifically thinking about.

Then what happens when you take this modern conundrum of trauma discourse and bring it to Roman elegy?

Often what I do is start with a problem trauma presents in modernity and see if I if I can find an analogous problem in elegy, and there are a striking number of parallels. For example, one of my chapters looks at Tibullus presenting himself, I argue, as a person who has been disenfranchised by land reappropriation. He claims that some of his family land has been taken away to make room for new, greedy people. Namely, newly landed soldiers returning from the wars. And in his case, that person is formerly enslaved. So what he’s doing is mobilizing an idea of trauma. He has suffered a misfortune. He is continuing to suffer a misfortune that he believes he should not have suffered. This misfortune plays with the idea of a broader negative cultural event with which many readers can sympathize. We know this was a larger concern for people because it pops up in his contemporaries Propertius, Horace, and Vergil as well. And then Tibullus blames his own loss of position on this guy who, prior to this Roman social reorganization, existed in an exploited class. He's activating the idea of a broader, cultural emotional pain in order to argue for the re-subjugation of a person who exists, historically, in a structurally less-privileged position than he does. So that’s one thing I'm talking about with the dangers of a trauma ethic: just because someone claims trauma and just because that trauma might even be real to them, it does not necessarily mean that the sort of repair for which they advocate is good or just.

Excellent, really cogently stated. But to circle back, that’s just your first project? What’s the second?

The second project is very different: it’s an intellectual history focused on Léopold Senghor, who was a poet and chief philosopher of the Francophone Pan-African school of thought négritude, and the first president of Senegal. But he was also a classics professor in France before he started his political career, and my case is that despite changing careers to become a politician, Senghor never actually gave up his philological and ancient historical habits, and that philology runs through many of the things he did with his politics and his philosophy. He was trying to construct what one might call a deep history of Black people prior to slavery and colonialism, which as a result does not depend on narratives of slavery and colonialism, so as to, in that decolonizing moment, construct a free past for Black people that would allow them to imagine a free future. Although he seems to have read very widely, much of his work does appear to have had a core in the classics as we conceive of it. And since he was primarily familiar with these ancient Greek and Roman texts, he tries to use them to reconstruct a Black past using both philology and, frankly, European race science, ethnology. He understandably has come under a lot of fire for his interest in ethnology and his strong belief in it, but I'm more interested in digging into his method and how it pairs with his philological and ancient historical methods, and seeing if we can construct a more comprehensive picture of what exactly he is doing, so that we can make more informed assessments on his thought and legacy.

This also sounds like a project rising from the overlap between history, literature, and theory. 

Yes. Yes, this is where I operate. This is where I like to live.

Sure, but I guess what amazes me is how one gets there. It requires a command of so much—how did you acquire it?

Well, we have several faculty I would say also operate at this juncture. Certainly both my advisors, Dan-el and Andrew, albeit in very different ways. There’s a kind of intellectual freedom that Princeton cultivates where in your earlier stages of training they really do let you throw things at the wall and see what sticks. And that was something I really needed. When I came to Princeton, I was very much operating at the intersection of history and literature but not so much theory. So when I was in my first year and I took a course with Dan-el on ancient media and modern media theory, it sort of gave me the initial toolkit to go exploring. And I have been encouraged to explore more and more the longer that I've been here. In writing my dissertation, I had advisors who asked very helpful questions about process and framing for the project, and got me to deconstruct and then construct for myself again what exactly my priorities, goals, and methods are as a scholar. I think this, the self-awareness that this has developed in me, has been really helpful for both these projects. 

Recent news would definitely seem to confirm that. And it’s wonderful to hear that about your time in Princeton Classics.

It's a good program with good people. I do think that one of the good things about graduate education is that you can decide who you want to be. And I think the best graduate education helps guide but doesn't tell you what to be. There were several times when I approached professors and I went, “I want to do this.” They didn’t always agree, but they were very supportive and knew how to point me in a good direction.