Meet Emily Baragwanath, Associate Professor Program Director
August 21, 2024 | Ruby Wang
Shortly after her promotion in 2013, Emily Baragwanath joined the Institute for the Arts and Humanities’ Associate Professor Program, finding community with fellow faculty.
Hailing from the classics department, Baragwanath was glad to meet other faculty at the same rank from across the College of Arts and Sciences. “When you’re in a smaller department, you might be the only person recently promoted,” she noted. “I found it very helpful, mainly for a sense of community and as an opportunity to share our experiences.”
Now, Baragwanath is a professor of classics and the Director for the Associate Professor Program. Baragwanath aspires to extend the same opportunities for building community that she had appreciated.
Associate professors experience various pressures in addition to their teaching and ongoing research: greater administrative load, invitations for talks, and writing their next publication. And that’s just the academic side; for several faculty members, there are family responsibilities to balance, too.
“Suddenly, a lot of horizons open and it can be helpful to think purposefully about it,” said Baragwanath. “What is it you want to prioritize? How do you avoid feeling like you’ve been blown off course by all the demands on your time? How do you retain a sense of joy in your research and teaching?”
For the APP, Baragwanath plans to coordinate a panel featuring faculty from different departments and backgrounds to discuss their trajectory to full professors. “It would be a session on prioritizing and cutting through the noise to be sure you’re spending these years on what will be fulfilling to you,” said Baragwanath.
As a scholar specializing in the ancient Mediterranean, a global perspective is imperative for Baragwanath’s research. After completing her B.A. and M.A. at the University of Auckland, she received a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford to complete her doctorate at Magdalen College and a post-doc at Christ Church. Since then, she’s been based in Carolina, with stints away in Washington D.C. and at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
Baragwanath seeks to introduce opportunities for international associate professors to connect with the APP participants, aligning with the Institute’s priorities on expanding global impact.
“If you’re not making these global connections, you’re missing out on all sorts of rich opportunities,” said Baragwanath. “I would like to harness the diverse perspectives of international scholars and invite them to share their experiences with the local and North American community at UNC.”
In 2019, Baragwanath received the Schwab Academic Excellence Award from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities, and her work has been supported through several grants from the IAH. She has received multiple prestigious fellowships, including from the National Humanities Center in 2020-21 and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in 2012.
Currently, Baragwanath is completing the final revisions on “Xenophon’s Women: Friendship, Economics, and War” (forthcoming, Cambridge University Press), a book on the fourth century Athenian writer, philosopher and general Xenophon. “Xenophon’s Women” analyzes Xenophon’s historical writings, Socratic dialogues, and treatises to examine gender portrayal in fourth-century Athens. In fall 2024, Baragwanath will teach a graduate seminar on Xenophon along with an undergrad course on Herodotus.
Visit the Associate Professor Program webpage to stay updated on upcoming events and programming.
Categories: Featured News Content, News