Swarthmore Classics Summer Seminar 2017: Pedagogy and Recruitment
Swarthmore College
Organizers: Grace Ledbetter (Swarthmore College), Sarah Lannom (The Brearley School)
All events, including meals, will take place in the Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall.
Friday, July 21, 2017
6:00–8:00 Dinner, Scheuer Room, Kohlberg Hall
Saturday, July 22, 2017
8:30–9:00 Breakfast
9:00–9:45 Opening Lecture: Grace Ledbetter (Chair of Classics, Swarthmore College) “Methods for Interpreting Classical Receptions in Art and Literature”
Panel I: “Pedagogy“
Moderator: Sarah Lannom (The Brearley School)
9:45–11:30 Ivy Livingston (Harvard University) “Intensive versus Extensive Reading in Language Classes”
Carin Ruff (Hill Monastic Manuscript Library) “Bringing Latin Paleography to the Classroom with Online Manuscript Resources”
Christy Ruff Wagner (The Blake School) “From 6th Grade to Post AP: Blake Latin”
11:30–11:45 Coffee
Panel II: “Recruitment and Retention“
Moderator: Kathleen Coleman (Harvard University)
11:45–1:00 Jay Kardan (Randolph College) “Randolph College’s Latin Book Award: A Recruiting Tool for Classics Students”
Sarah Lannom (The Brearley School) "The Three Rs: Recruitment, Retention, and Relevance"
Molly Jones-Lewis (University of Maryland, Baltimore County) "Reach Out and Touch Something: Living History, Experimental Archaeology, and Outreach"
1:00–2:00 Lunch
Panel III: “Interdisciplinary Approaches”
Moderator: Jeremy Lefkowitz (Swarthmore College)
2:00–4:00 Amanda Klause (Academy of Notre Dame de Namur) “’A Stranger He Came’: Teaching Citizenship across Space and Time”
Kyle Khellaf (Yale University) "Intersectional Empires: Ancient and Modern"
Mira Seo (Yale-NUS College) “Cultural Encounters in Global Antiquity”
4:00–4:15 Coffee
4:30–5:30 Keynote: Kathleen Coleman (Harvard University) “Epigraphy for Undergraduates”
6:00–8:00 Dinner
8:00 Party at Jeremy Lefkowitz’s house
Speakers
Kathleen Coleman is the James Loeb Professor of the Classics at Harvard University and has served for five years as Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Classics Department. She was born and raised in Zimbabwe and educated at the Universities of Cape Town, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Oxford. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 1998, she taught at the University of Cape Town and Trinity College Dublin. She specializes in Latin literature of the Flavian and Trajanic periods and in Roman social history, especially spectacle and punishment.
Molly Jones-Lewis (Swarthmore ‘03) earned her PhD at The Ohio State University and now is a cultural historian of Roman medicine. She has published on ancient toxicology, medical politics, and the social position of Roman physicians, and her volume, The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds, co-edited with Rebecca Kennedy, came out in 2016. Her monograph, The Doctor in Roman Law and Society, will be published with Routledge UK late in 2019. She held visiting positions at several colleges and universities before settling into Lecturer-hood at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC), where she teaches a hefty roster of classes and serves on the Ancient Studies department outreach committee.
Jay Kardanholds degrees in classics from Swarthmore College (’84) and Yale University. After more than twenty years outside academia as an editor and translator of scholarly and commercial texts, he was invited to teach at Randolph College in 2009 (where he will serve as acting chair of the classics department in spring 2018) and at Sweet Briar College in 2015. He has taught the full range of Latin and Greek language courses at both colleges, as well as classics senior seminar, Latin teaching lab, first-year seminar, and the occasional civilization-in-translation course.
Kyle Khellaf graduated from Swarthmore in 2008 and went on to complete an M.A. in classical languages at the University of Georgia. Kyle is currently a doctoral candidate in classics at Yale University, where he is putting the finishing touches on his dissertation, “The Paratextual Past: Digression in Classical Historiography.” He also looks forward to chairing a panel that he has organized for next year's Annual Meeting of the SCS, entitled “Deterritorializing Classics: Deleuze, Guattari, and their Philological Discontents.”
Amanda Klause (Swarthmore ‘12) received her PhD in Classics from Princeton University in 2017. Her dissertation was a study of the consolatory poems in Statius’ Silvae. Some of her other research interests are reflected in an essay on Statius’ depiction of Campania (Classical Outlook, 2016), as well as a study of the early modern poet Aphra Behn’s reception of Lucretius (forthcoming in a volume entitled Classics in Extremis: The Edges of Classical Reception, ed. Edmund Richardson). In the fall, she will take up a position as the Latin teacher at the Academy of Notre Dame de Namur in Villanova, PA.
Sarah Lannom graduated from Swarthmore in 2009 with high honors and received her PhD in classical philology from Harvard in 2016. Her dissertation, “Pindaric Aspects of Ovid’s Metamorphoses” was an analysis of epinician tropes in the Metamorphoses. She is still not sure if it makes any sense at all but is very happy that it is finished. While at Harvard, she was the Assistant Director of Undergraduate Studies for two years and became interested in the nuts and bolts of recruitment and retention. She now teaches middle and upper school Latin at The Brearley School in New York City.
Grace Ledbetter is Associate Professor of Classics and Philosophy at Swarthmore College, Chair of Classics, and Director of the college’s Honors Program. She teaches courses in ancient philosophy, Greek Drama, Homer, and Classical Reception. Her research focuses on Plato and on the role that Greco-Roman mythology has played in the histories of ballet and opera. She is currently working on a comprehensive study of Plato’s reception of the Greek poets.
Jeremy Lefkowitz is Associate Professor of Classics at Swarthmore College, where he teaches courses that draw upon his broad interests in Greek and Latin language, literature, and culture, including topics in myth, epic, drama, intellectual history, and the reception of the classical past in the contemporary world. His current research is focused on the ancient fable tradition, with an emphasis on style in fable-writing and the place of fable-telling in literary culture and history.
Ivy Livingston studied classics at Brown University and Cornell University. She served as an assistant professor at Harvard for six years, but now holds the rank of Preceptor in the Classics, responsible for overseeing introductory and intermediate classes in Latin and Ancient Greek. Ivy is also the production editor forHarvard Studies in Classical Philology. She is interested in language pedagogy, particularly the use of technology in language learning, as well as both print and digital publishing.
Carin Ruff was a Latin major and Greek minor in the class of 1987. She has an MPhil (Oxford) and PhD (Toronto) in Medieval Studies and has published on the history of Latin pedagogy. She has taught Old English, Medieval Latin, and paleography at John Carroll University, UC-Berkeley, Cornell, and the University of Maryland. She is the content creator for western manuscripts for the vHMML project of HMML, the Hill Monastic Manuscript Library at St. John’s Abbey, Collegeville, Minnesota, where she regularly teaches workshops on paleography and codicology.
A classics major at Swarthmore, Mira Seo graduated from the Honors program with High Honors in 1995. From 1995–1998 she studied at Christ Church College, Oxford, earning her second BA in Greats. In 2004 she received her PhD in Classics from Princeton University. After teaching at Swarthmore as a visitor in 2004–2005, Mira joined the departments of Classical Studies and Comparative Literature at University of Michigan as an assistant professor in 2005. Upon earning tenure at University of Michigan in 2012, she was recruited with her husband, Nicholas Tolwinski, to join the founding faculty of Yale-NUS College, a new liberal arts college in Singapore, where they both teach. Her book, Exemplary Traits: Reading Characterization in Roman Poetry (OUP), was published in 2013.
After graduating from Swarthmore in 1990, Christy Ruff Wagner taught Latin at Governor Mifflin High School in Shillington, PA. She then got her Masters in Classics from Michigan, where she met her husband, also a Classicist. They spent the next number of years teaching in boarding schools on the East coast, Hebron Academy in Maine and Brooks in North Andover, MA. 13 years ago, they moved to Minnesota to start the Latin program at Blake. She found her calling as a middle school teacher and has been teaching 6th, 7th, and 8th grade Latin ever since.
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