The project invites a global and sustained criticism toward the kinds of narratives that are used to teach people about their place in the world, and it historicizes the roots of these narratives through careful literary analysis. The general contributions of this project to academic study, beyond the individual work on any given text or tradition, is one that I think is particularly important today—since, of course, progress models continue to be efficacious fictions that shape our sense of political realities. In recent years, as populism is on the rise and inter-state tensions flare up across the world, xenophobic discourses about the greatness of individual cultures over others keeps finding new ways to manipulate our knowledge of the past to suit new political narratives. As such, my project represents an attempt to look at the roots of an enormous and still urgent political set of issues—the way in which we naturalize the present in terms of a perceived sequence of past events. Throughout my project and its publications, as in all of my work on ancient literature, I will keep this political horizon in mind and make sure to develop my thoughts on this aspect rigorously. I particularly hope that my public lectures will allow me to address these matters, using key examples from the project as material through which to address contemporary issues. In sum, the project has a clear political contribution—and whether through teaching, publications, and public lectures, I hope it will help people today look more critically at the kinds of narratives through which they have been taught to define humanity and, as a consequence, themselves and their place in the world.
