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 spans the study of Greek and Latin, from ancient to modern times, and explores their influence on a diverse range of figures, including John Milton, Gianni Versace, Tom Stoppard, Audre Lorde, Emma Amos, David Lynch, and Edgar A. Poe.

Dr. Ronnick’s groundbreaking work in the reception and impact of classical studies on people of African descent, which began in the early 1990s, helped establish a new field of scholarship known today as Black Classicism or Classica Africana. Her photo installation on Black Classicists, developed with support from the James Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University, debuted at the Detroit Public Library in 2003 and has since been displayed at nearly 80 venues.

Her article, “William Sanders Scarborough: The First African American Member of the Modern Language Association,” published in the Publications of the Modern Language Association (2000), was instrumental in the creation of the William Sanders Scarborough Book Prize, awarded annually by the Modern Language Association since 2001. In 2020, the American School for Classical Studies in Athens established the William Sanders Scarborough Fellowship for study in Greece.

Throughout her career, Dr. Ronnick has received numerous accolades, including a proclamation from her hometown, Sarasota, Florida, declaring March 12, 2005, as Michele Valerie Ronnick Day in recognition of her work on William Scarborough. In 2006, she was awarded the key to the city of Macon, Georgia, 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.