A conversation with Alain Schnapp

On 13 November 2017, Yannis Hamilakis, Felipe Rojas, and several other archaeologists at Brown University engaged in a conversation with Alain Schnapp about his life and career. Hamilakis and Rojas were interested in learning about how Schnapp’s early academic and political interests intersected with the history of Classics and classical archaeology in France, Europe and elsewhere in the world, and also about the origins and current aims of Schnapp’s work on the history of archaeology and antiquarianism and the cross-cultural history of ruins. Schnapp and his interlocutors began by discussing Schnapp’s formative years and the intersections between archaeology and politics in mid-20th-century France. Their conversation turns to the role of individual scholars, specifically classicists and archaeologists, in the momentous social events in Paris in 1968. The final part of the dialogue concerns Schnapp’s contributions to the history of archaeology and the possibilities of engaging in the comparison of antiquarian traditions.