Editorial Statement

After something of a hiatus, we’re happy to announce the return of the Helicon, Yale’s undergraduate journal of Classics.

Our mission remains the same: to publish exemplary undergraduate engagements, preoccupations, and struggles with the classical world. These conversations abound, both in our classrooms and in our common rooms. We’d like to do our part to make sure they’re heard.

We are, however, making some changes to our pursuit of that goal. Most importantly, we’ll be reviving our print journal, discontinued since 2015. The print Helicon will, as it has traditionally done, highlight our more academic submissions, in the hope of treating the questions posed by undergraduate scholarship at Yale and beyond with the significance they merit.

At the same time, we’ll continue to explore the possibilities created by Medium through the online version of Helicon to ensure that our authors’ work reaches well beyond Yale’s campus. We’ll publish great scholarship here, but we’ll also publish the sort of pieces you wouldn’t normally see in an academic journal: reviews, translations, personal thoughts, reflections, original poetry. We believe that the insights that classicists can offer to the field extend beyond what can be expressed in a scholarly article. Recent examples— among them the Eidolon of the Paideia Institute, Cloelia of the Women’s Classical Caucus, and Mary Beard’s blog “A Don’s Life”— have showcased various brilliant and unorthodox ways to convey the significance of such insights. We hope to engage with and appreciate the Classics from a similar perspective, privileging material as accessible as it is urgent — and perhaps, on occasion, even fun.

We hope we can count on your help in rethinking, challenging, and expanding the Greece and Rome we think we know in the months and years to come. Submit to us at theyalehelicon@gmail.com — we look forward to hearing from you.

Paul Eberwine & Sherry Lee
Editors-in-Chief