REDEFINING CLASSICS

Michele Valerie Ronnick is a Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her scholarship includes studies of Greek and Latin from ancient to modern times including their influence on a wide range of people including John Milton, Gianni Versace, Tom Stoppard, Audre Lorde, Emma Amos, David Lynch, and Edgar A. Poe. Her pioneering investigations into
the reception and impact of classical studies upon people of African descent began in the early 1990s has opened up a new field of scholarship known today as Black Classicism, a.k.a. Classica Africana. Her photo installation on Black Classicists developed with the support of the James Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University has been since its first exhibit at the Detroit Public Library in September 2003 displayed at nearly 80 venues. Her article, “William Sanders Scarborough: The First African American Member of the Modern Language Association,”Publications of the Modern Language Association, Special Millennial Edition issued in 2000, stimulated the Modern Language Association to create the William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize which has been given annually since 2001. In 2020 the American School for Classical Studies in Athens established the “William Sanders Scarborough Fellowship” for study in Greece. Along the way, she has won a number of awards. She is particularly proud to have received a proclamation from her hometown, Sarasota, Florida. declaring March 12, 2005 ‘Michele Valerie Ronnick Day’ in honor of her work on William Scarborough and in 2006 the key to the city of Macon, Georgia, presented by Mayor C. Jack Ellis for her book, The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.