The New Helicon
The Helicon, Yale’s Undergraduate Journal of Classics, has for years exhibited some of the best scholarship by Yale students. Its mission has always been to lift those achievements out of the private conversation between a student and a teacher, and display them to friends, classmates, and anyone else. That is a good way to celebrate what undergraduates do well — and what Yale undergraduates do extremely well.
Lately it has become clear that the magazine is ready for change. The difficulty of physically printing new issues has often caused our small team to delay publication, at the expense of our authors. Even as students fill up the courses offered by the Department of Classics (and overfill them), few students know to submit their work. Our old website belongs to the clunky Wordpress, which makes searching, sharing, and even reading difficult.
We are proud to announce, therefore, our move to Medium.com. Medium hosts all different kinds of publications, from food journalism to travel literature. Registered users easily sign up for free, mark their interests, and begin reading; Medium lets them keep track of their favorite publications and discover new ones with adjacent topics. Unregistered users can still click and read. On our side, too, Medium is better: it lets editors and authors collaborate easily, exchanging ideas and revisions, before a piece goes live. And Medium’s proximity to social media outlets will help us reach more readers than was possible on Wordpress.
We will publish here continuously, rather than once a semester; sometimes we will call up old pieces that we think deserve a second reading, but most of all we encourage Yale undergraduates to submit their drafts, proposals or finished work now — or indeed at any time. Submit to theyalehelicon@gmail.com. We think Max Norman’s deep, readable engagement with Augustine’s Confessions — a text not often read by American Classics departments — makes a propitious beginning for the new Helicon .
Our move to Medium was partly inspired by the example of the Paideia Institute’s Eidolon, a journal not even a year old that has made a huge impact by recruiting scholars to write for the public. An article about the Aeneid and the Israel-Palestine conflict, for example, provoked real collaboration between its author and Palestinian scholars. Even as we publish the work Yale students do for class, then, we also hope to host Yale classicists who think and write outside of their coursework. That way the new Helicon will be a better meeting place for classmates, writers and readers.
