I was so grateful to be invited by Professor David Konstan, my Brown University dissertation adviser back in the day, to give a talk about my latest research on emotion in ancient Egypt for New York University’s Ranieri Colloquium on Ancient Studies in the Center for Ancient Studies. The colloquium, “Before Emotion II: Further Conversations in Pre-Modern Cultures,” provided a platform for a stimulating discussion on the discursive category of “emotion” across languages, cultures, and histories.
My dissertation, which was the first comprehensive study of emotion in ancient Egypt, apparently inaugurated a whole new field in Egyptology, as I found out when I was congratulated and celebrated at a conference in Europe for paving the way. To reunite with Professor Konstan for this NYU event was a dream come true, and it really made it feel like our intellectual collaboration had come full circle, as it was his research on emotion in ancient Greece and ancient Rome that made my research on emotion in ancient Egypt possible.
Sadly, this spring, much to our shock and dismay, our beloved colleague Prof. Konstan unexpectedly passed away — he had been planning to spend the summer teaching in Europe and continuing his grand global adventures. We were all devastated.
At the time, I was going through a medical emergency (with lifesaving surgery and a hospitalization to boot), so I still have not really had time to process his passing and our immense sadness at losing not just a brilliant colleague but also an outstanding human being (the very best of humanity!) — he was always so generous in helping young scholars around the world expand their knowledge and advance their research.
When I was teaching in China during the pandemic, I beamed Prof. Konstan into my classroom at Sichuan University to enlighten my students about emotion and understandings of mental health and illness in ancient Greece (as you’ll read in my new book on China). Similarly, last year, I invited him into my Parami University classroom to discuss Plato’s “The Theaetetus” with my Burmese students in civil war torn Myanmar. Prof. Konstan is and will continue to be greatly missed by us all — in his honor and memory, we will be publishing the research we presented on ancient emotion at the NYU colloquium in a collected volume.
