Rebecca LeMoine, Ph.D., associate professor of political science in Florida Atlantic’s Department of Political Science in the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters, was recently awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Award for Faculty at Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). LeMoine was one of 28 professors nationwide to receive the grant for this cycle.
The Awards for Faculty at HSIs program strengthens the humanities at HSIs by encouraging and expanding humanities research opportunities for individual faculty and staff members. Awards provide the individual recipient with time to write, conduct research and pursue other project-related activities.
LeMoine’s $60,000 award will support research and writing for her book project, “Music and the Politics of Cultural Diversity in Ancient Greek Thought.” While much has been written on music and politics in classical antiquity, the role of culture and ethnicity is often neglected in these accounts. LeMoine said that this is a major oversight, as the Greeks fundamentally conceived of music in connection to the cultures of their world. By providing the first examination of music and the politics of cultural diversity in ancient Greek thought from the archaic through the classical periods, LeMoine’s book will help to recover the rich conversation about the treatment of foreigners that lies at the center of the Greeks’ frequent evocations of music and politics.
The book will argue that the strong association of music with cultural identity supplied the Greeks with a “shortcut” for grasping the essence of a particular culture and thereby an effective tool for contemplating political issues related to cross-cultural engagement, from immigration to global justice—a tool that we today can also use.
The project builds on LeMoine’s first book, “Plato’s Caves: The Liberating Sting of Cultural Diversity,” which defends the bold thesis that Plato was a friend of cultural diversity, contrary to many contemporary perceptions. While writing this book, LeMoine noticed that Plato often couches accounts of cross-cultural relations in musical language or references musical styles and instruments that would have been perceived as foreign. Her second book seeks to gain a deeper understanding of what work music is doing in platonic and, more broadly, ancient political theorizing on the politics of cultural diversity.
