Coming home to Mount Holyoke and the classics
The Department of Classics and Italian’s new professor isn’t new to Mount Holyoke. As a member of the class of 2001, she describes her return to campus as a homecoming.
Nicole Brown’s arrival on campus as an assistant professor of classics is a full-circle moment. As a member of the class of 2001, she describes her undergraduate experience as transformative.
“I came from a background where higher education for women was not necessarily a given,” she said. “Coming to Mount Holyoke opened my eyes in so many ways. I have memories of sitting in beautiful wood-paneled offices surrounded by books and just having the most incredible conversations with my professors. This is a place that has nourished me at various points of my life, even after I graduated.”
Over the years, Brown stayed in touch with her Mount Holyoke professors, who helped shape her career. She earned a Frances Mary Hazen Alum Fellowship, allowing her to participate in the archaeological excavation of a Roman villa in Populonia, Italy. As a result, she earned her Ph.D. in classical art and archaeology from Princeton University. After seven years at Williams College, Brown is ready to join Mount Holyoke’s Department of Classics and Italian, which she described as “small but mighty.”
Brown believes that the joining of classics and Italian gives the department unique historical depth and cultural richness. And there’s a practical benefit: She needs to read and speak Italian for her research. With colleagues who are fluent in Italian just down the hall, “it will be wonderful to be able to speak Italian on a regular basis,” she said. “And I’m excited to think with students and colleagues about the similarities and differences between ancient and modern Mediterranean cultures.”
This fall, Brown will teach Latin 101 — the same class she supported as a tutor during her undergraduate studies. “I love teaching Latin,” said Brown, who taught the language to middle and high school students after graduating from Mount Holyoke. “I love that it’s an entry point for so many people into the field of classics.”
Brown will also teach Art and Experience in Ancient Rome, which she is excited about because it offers her a chance to explore the ways in which Roman art is “never just art.”
“Roman art doesn’t exist for purely aesthetic reasons. It is always rooted in social reality,” Brown said. The course “opens the door for thinking about all the different kinds of viewers [who] interacted with Roman art — not just elite males. How did formerly enslaved and enslaved persons interact with, say, the elaborate painted frescoes that were along the walls of the houses that they worked in or lived in?”
Brown is currently working on two research projects: She’s finishing a book on late republican and imperial Rome (200 BCE.–200 CE), which demonstrates how a narrative of the capital’s rustic origins was deliberately curated by state-sponsored art, architecture and preserved open spaces to promote elite self-interests. This process played a critical role in shaping Rome’s cultural and ideological identity over many centuries.
Her second project builds on these themes by focusing on an animal often forgotten in classics scholarship: domestic sheep. “Despite their centrality to Roman life, they have often been overlooked,” Brown said. Sheep “provided food [and] clothing and played integral roles in religious ritual, taking on cultural and symbolic significance, especially around conceptions of leadership, citizenship and the human condition.” She looks forward to working on this project with students, especially examining artistic and literary evidence from time periods that “haven’t been scrutinized very much.”
Brown said, “[Someday,] I’d love to bring sheep [onto] campus, if only for a few hours,” perhaps in concert with a symposium delving into their role in ancient Roman art and culture.
But she will also visit plenty of the more typical fixtures on campus this fall — places she first connected with a quarter century ago. “I used to stop into the Talcott Greenhouse almost every day. That was my happy place on campus all through winter — it’s such a meditative and uplifting place,” she said. Other favorite spots she’ll be exploring again include the reading room of the library and the Equestrian Center.
“To me, it’s the most beautiful campus, the essence of what an undergraduate campus should be,” Brown said. “There are so many places I’m ready to inhabit again — the whole community, really. I’m so excited for its dynamism and how it’s owning its place in this country in this moment in history.”
