Treasuring classic texts,engagement and the gender gap in the geographical canon

Abstract

This commentary highlights the importance of engagement with academic work in order for it to have impact within the histories and intellectual legacies of our discipline. Any canon or corpus of classics identifies excellence and impact, but like any archive is inevitably selective and indicative of contextual power-relations. The marginalisation of excellent work through lack of engagement has impoverished our disciplinary inheritance, notably through gendering our discipline's narrative and epistemology. Any emerging attempt to define even fluid and dynamic canons needs to be inclusive and reflexive.