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Elizabeth Baltes’ research and teaching interests cross traditional disciplinary boundaries to consider the intersection of sculpture, politics, identity, and public space in the ancient Greek world. Her first book project, Portrait Statues in Hellenistic Greece, investigates how statue landscapes at such important sites as Delphi and Delos helped to articulate and reinforce a complex set of political and social identities and how space was utilized and manipulated on a local and regional level. Dr. Baltes’ scholarly work has been published in multiple venues, including the American Journal of Archaeology and Hesperia, and her research has been generously supported by grants from the Archaeological Institute of America, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the American Philosophical Society, and the Loeb Classical Library Foundation.

AGLSP TEACHING AWARD – 2025

Fragments as Pedagogy: On Teaching in Graduate Liberal Studies

Elizabeth Baltes, Coastal Carolina University 

The present remarks were presented as part of the Annual Conference of the
Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs, October 9, 2025.

It is an honor to address you at this year’s AGLSP conference, especially as we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the association. To be recognized for teaching in graduate liberal studies at such a milestone feels especially meaningful. Anniversaries are moments of reflection, but also of possibility. They remind us of where we have come from, and they invite us to imagine where we might go next. In this way, they place us at a kind of crossroads—an apt frame for this year’s conference, Interdisciplinary Approaches in a Changing World.

My own academic path began at such a crossroads. I majored in political science as an undergraduate, but after completing my degree I spent several years outside academia—working, reflecting, and uncertain of my direction. Eventually, I found myself drawn back through art history. At the time, I had no idea what it meant to be an art historian—much less one who would devote a career to the study of the ancient world—but I sensed that I had found a place where questions of politics, identity, monuments, and memory might converge.

The summer after my first year of graduate school, I traveled to Greece for the first time as part of the Summer Session of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. This long-running program, often described as an archaeological “bootcamp,” was a transformative experience. To encounter archaeological sites and works of art I had only seen in books was overwhelming in the best sense.

One site in particular has stayed with me: the island of Delos, now uninhabited but once a thriving city. Walking through the ruins of its sacred and civic spaces, I encountered base after base that preserved the traces of lost bronze portrait statues—carved footprints or inscriptions naming honored individuals.

What captivated me then—and continues to shape my scholarship now—is the way ancient objects often stand at intersections: between politics and religion, material and memory, presence and absence. Few bronze portraits survive from antiquity, and marble examples are often fragmentary—disembodied heads, hands, or feet, stray pieces of drapery tucked away in storerooms. Yet even in their incompleteness, these remnants compel us to reconstruct meaning. Some of my scholarship now involves digitally reconstructing these statue landscapes. These reconstructions are based on evidence, but they are also necessarily interpretive and hypothetical, pieced together from fragmentary remains (see, for example, the image below[1]).

What I have learned through the process is that to work with fragments is to engage possibility. Ancient remains rarely present us with a complete whole. Instead, they ask us to imagine what is missing, to interpret what endures, and to see how meaning can be assembled from pieces that do not fully cohere. That same interpretive work is, for me, the essence of pedagogy in graduate liberal studies.

GLS is not a field defined by a single discipline or fixed trajectory. It thrives at intersections—where lived experience, scholarly inquiry, and creative practice come together in ways that resist neat closure. Like the fragments I study, GLS asks us to linger with complexity, to imagine new meanings, and to embrace graduate education as an open-ended process.

Ongoing scholarship in art history, visual studies, and related fields has helped me think more explicitly about fragments as a theoretical framework.[2] To approach something as fragmentary is not only to note its incompleteness, but to recognize how it challenges our perceptions and compels new modes of interpretation. Fragments provoke curiosity, but they also demand imaginative labor and intellectual expansiveness. In this sense, they are not simply objects to be studied; they offer a model for how inquiry itself might proceed.

In his edited volume, The Fragment: An Incomplete History, William Tronzo has theorized fragments as things we, as viewers and interpreters, might receive (such as the empty statue bases on Delos), but also as things that are created––works in progress that visualize a process of becoming. This way of thinking has profoundly shaped the way I approach teaching in graduate liberal studies.

Students in GLS rarely arrive as blank slates. They bring fragments of earlier lives and learning: professional expertise, creative practices, intellectual curiosities, and sometimes uncertainty. Some return after decades away from the classroom; others step into fields they once believed were not open to them. What unites them is not a single trajectory, but the challenge and possibility of weaving together varied experiences into something new.

I think here of a recent student who completed his undergraduate degree in interdisciplinary studies with a focus on animal studies. For his master’s thesis, he explored questions of animal agency and the ethics of captivity in zoos. That project has since propelled him into a PhD program in art history at Duke, where he is expanding these questions into new terrain. Another student entered our program after majoring in business. Through GLS coursework, she discovered a passion for human rights and social justice and is now preparing for law school, where she hopes to advocate for those at the margins. Still another, trained as a graphic designer, is pivoting toward Asian studies and modes of interdisciplinary translation. His thesis will likely take the form of an “illuminated” project that integrates visual design with scholarly argument, complicating the line between text and image.

These stories are not exceptions—they are emblematic of what graduate liberal studies makes possible. Such programs offer something rare in higher education today: a space where varied experiences are not deficits to be remediated, but resources to be engaged. At a time when universities are often caricatured as elitist or out of touch, programs like ours create spaces for transformation—not into something distant or exclusionary, but into fuller versions of who our students already are.

Teaching in this context becomes interpretive work: less about transmitting knowledge than about fostering connections, less about restoring a whole than about honoring what is present and helping it unfold in new directions. It is work that requires curiosity, empathy, and rigor––qualities that, to me, define liberal studies. It is a discipline of generosity expressed through a practice of openness: of learning to read across boundaries, to inhabit perspectives not our own, and to see the value in what first appears unfamiliar.

And it is work that depends on trust—trust in the student’s capacity to grow, trust in the generative potential of interdisciplinarity, and trust in the idea that education is not merely accumulation, but, as William Tronzo might have it, a process of becoming.

This process isn’t always easy. Interpretation rarely is. Ancient fragments do not explain themselves; indeed, they resist certainty. They ask us to sit with ambiguity. In the same way, working with GLS students means resisting the impulse to simplify or categorize. It means recognizing the value of nonlinear paths, of disjointed beginnings, of unexpected intersections.

As AGLSP marks its fiftieth anniversary, I find myself thinking again of those statue bases on Delos. They remind us that incompleteness does not diminish meaning. Indeed, their incompleteness makes fragments active sites of learning and interpretation. Graduate liberal studies feels much the same. It, too, thrives in the unfinished, in what is still open to imagination and becoming. That, I think, is the strength of liberal studies—at fifty years and beyond.

Notes

[1] Figure 14 in Dillon, Sheila, and Elizabeth P. Baltes. “Honorific Practices and the Politics of Space on Hellenistic Delos: Portrait Statue Monuments Along the Dromos.” American Journal of Archaeology 117, no. 2 (April 2013): 207-246.

[2] For example, William Tronzo, ed., The Fragment: An Incomplete History (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2009); S. Rebecca Martin and Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper, eds., The Tiny and the Fragmented: Miniature, Broken, or Otherwise Incomplete Objects in the Ancient World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).