The #BritishAcademy: Four questions with Dr #FrederikaTevebring, one of the headliners for this year’s #SummerShowcase

Dr Frederika Tevebring

British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Classics at King’s College London and one of the headliners for this year’s British Academy Summer Showcase

1. What have you been reading, watching, and listening to over the last month?

I have been reading Maria Stavrinaki’s Transfixed by Modernity, which describes how prehistory was discovered (or, as Stavrinaki calls it ‘invented’) in the 20th century. Stavrinaki shows how discoveries from humanity’s beginnings resonated with modern fears of humanity’s end, fuelled by the world wars and the atom bomb. She analyses art works from the 1930s onwards and discusses how they referenced prehistory while reflecting on the present and future. This work has been very helpful for my own research about archaeologists and artists who engaged with theories of a prehistoric matriarchy as a model for future society.  

2. What book do you always return to?

I often find myself returning to Ursula le Guin’s novels when I think about the fascination with the past and the possibility of discovering a society that organised itself completely differently from us. Le Guin was the child of anthropologists, and most of her novels feature an anthropologist-like character; a visitor trying to wrap their head around a different way of living. Inevitably, the very presence of this outsider does something to the thing they are supposed to research. Her books think about how researching is never a completely neutral act, you always bring something of yourself to what your studying.

Her books also address what I find so interesting with researching gender and sexuality in the past. She will build a society with its technology, environment, and political system. But what she is really keen to explore is what it would feel like (in a physical, sensual way) to live in it. In The Dispossessed, for example, she describes an anarchic society in a rather arid environment and then she asked what it would mean in this society to have sex, raise children, and to make art (in a society where nobody owns property would you, for example, call a child or partner “your”?). Public conversations around gender and sexuality are quite focused on identity and individual choice. In my work, I’m interested in how the way a society organises family or sexual relationships intersects with how, for example, resources are allocated, and power is distributed.  

3. What’s your guilty pleasure to read, watch or listen to?

I try not to feel too guilty about my pleasures. I’m always excited when my research gives me reason to read a fun sci-fi/fantasy novel about archaeologists or anthropologists stumbling upon some long-lost goddess cult, like Elizabeth Hand’s Waking the Moon from 1994. A more recent example is Alice Albinia’s Cwen from 2021, about an attempt to institute a form of matriarchy on a remote British island. There is one character who is a rather hapless academic travelling around Britain in search for clues about ancient goddess worship, that one hit close to home!

4. What’s one piece of interesting advice you can give us that you’ve learnt from your subjects?

There are very few things that are constant about human society. Archaeology gives us a window into the many ways that family, society or the relationship to animals and nature can be imagined and there is very little we can take for granted about past world views. I think that allows us to look at our own time with fresh eyes, perhaps even optimism – everything can (and probably one day will) be run quite differently.

We are delighted to celebrate the 2024 British Academy Summer Showcase as we share one of our headliners,

Dr Frederika Tevebring’s recommendations for what to read, watch and listen to in this special edition.

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