David Yates

I was a first-generation college student from Southwest Virginia. I always loved history, ancient in particular. When I went to college, I didn’t want to stop with mere translations and so I started studying Latin and ancient Greek as well. In graduate school, I increasingly concentrated on Greek history and history writing (or historiography). I was fascinated by the differences between what happened and what the ancients themselves thought happened. This got me really interested in monuments and memory theory — essentially, how do humans remember the past and then transmit that memory over generations, not just in written histories, but in myths, songs, grave markers, rituals and monuments? A lot of my scholarship is about these acts of memory-making, both at the broader social level and in the formal process of composing history.