This article introduces the reader to current work at the intersection of classical studies and the public humanities. It begins from the observation that in recent years, efforts by classical scholars to relate to a wider public have intensified and taken on a new quality. Not so long ago, public-facing research was considered detrimental to “real” scholarship. By contrast, as this article sets out to show, there is now a growing interest in a true exchange of perspectives, knowledges, and methodologies with stakeholders outside of the confines of the academe. I argue that some of the most interesting work in this space emerges from the way in which the aims and objectives of the public humanities intersect with several trends currently driving classical studies. These include the emergence of the digital humanities, the maturing of classical reception studies, and the (often difficult) conversations around calls to “decolonize” the classics.

This article traces five hundred years of European and American academic and public music discourse through two disparate examples: Vicente Lusitano, a sixteenth-century Portuguese composer of African descent, and anti-Black comments directed at musicians Herbie Hancock and Quincy Jones in the 1984 documentary I Love Quincy. These threads converge in the present day, as discourse involving Lusitano increasingly contains a form of anti-Blackness that parallels what is presented by the film’s white director, Eric Lipmann, and more recent popular music discourse that echoes his perspective. Moreover, the longitude of Lusitano’s experience as a historical figure offers a unique vantage from which we can observe recursive rhetorical devices – denial, fantasy, and erasure – over time and in varied cultural contexts. Because these tropes support contemporary American anti-Black viewpoints as well as similarly flawed and destructive argumentation from historically distant European societies, we can see the continuity of denial, fantasy, and erasure in five hundred years of discourse as a sign that these musical cultures favor domination.

The public humanities have shaped ideas about sex, race, and gender. This is a cautionary tale that points to the repeated problems of the model of public humanities as academics or elites dispensing knowledge to a public audience. King Alfred of England ordered a set of texts “most needful for all men to know” translated into English. Long celebrated in English history as an example of public education, these translations also put forward certain ideas about race and sexuality for the emerging English public, a reminder of the ideological function of the public humanities. Likewise, modern scholars worried about medieval and classical texts that depict homosexuality becoming available to the public, so they refused to translate them or altered them. As a counter to such models, I consider the seventh-century Archbishop Theodore, a Syrian-born ecclesiast who ran the English church and who provides a model of a collaborative public humanities in which lay people shape knowledge and law together. Their model of public humanities encourages us to explore the historical Black public and their contributions to medieval studies that academic medieval studies have ignored.