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Plague, as represented in archaic and classical Greek sources, is an extreme test of social strength and cohesion, but despite its unrelenting viciousness, it kills, apparently, only the nameless. So in Greek literary plague narratives, heroes respond to the plague that they see around them through intercessions of the gods, but they themselves are not subject to the disease.

This paper focuses on how the plague moves through the spatial coordinates of three of the earliest and most canonical narratives of epidemic disease in Western literature: Homer’s Iliad (1-487), Sophocles’ Oedipus the King (1-215) and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War (2.47.3-2.54). The paper undertakes an examination of some of the key strategies the three narratives employ for their representation of the movement of the plague through space with two aims.

Title: Pod Save the Classics: Using Podcasts in the Secondary Classroom

A public facing project such as a podcast is an opportunity for academics to share their work with a broad audience. Podcasting is an important component of the future of classics, but it comes with a different set of production issues than traditional academic work. This talk will offer some lessons from my own podcasting experience to help illuminate these issues and the potential pitfalls of such a project, and provide some advice for future classics podcasters. My podcast will serve as just one example of the exciting possibilities of podcasting for our field.

Outside the Gaze: Podcasting Ancient Rome as Woman Scholars

The Partial Historians (https://partialhistorians.com/) is a Roman history podcast project which began in 2013 and continues today. The podcast was conceived as a project to keep the hosts in touch with ancient source material as we transitioned away from the precarity of the academy into different fields of labour.

Educational podcasts have proliferated in the past decade, and they reach a variety of listeners outside the scope of academic publishing. From busy commuters, to fitness enthusiasts, high school students, military personnel, and even manual laborers, podcasts have made on-demand educational audio available to anyone with an internet connection and music playing device. Top educational programs have tens of millions of downloads, and even specialty podcasts covering more esoteric material can be quite successful with the right writing and production.

This panelist will discuss ways to integrate race/ethnicity, gender/sexuality, daily life, classical receptions, role playing and non-Classical comparative material culture from a museum setting into history survey courses as ways to engage both the diversity of the ancient Mediterranean and questions of relevance for the contemporary world. The presentation will provide information and data on how integrating these topics and approaches changes the classroom experience.

This panelist will discuss the use of material culture and archaeology to critically approach questions of gender, class, and ethnicity in civilization, history, and mythology courses, as well as the use of epigraphic evidence and inscribed objects to create a more inclusive study of the ancient world for introductory language students.

Studies have shown that students learn best when they connect course material to personal experience and prior knowledge and contexts. Given the focus of mythology courses on story-telling, cultural values, and social norms, there is ample opportunity, as well as pedagogical justification, to consider the relevance of ancient narrative and its study to students' personal lives and the broader world in which they live.