Amphora: How to Use the Exhibit Hall at the Annual Meeting
By Ellen Bauerle | December 11, 2017
This article was originally published on the Amphora blog on January 6, 2016.
Blog: Teaching Comedy through Performance
By Serena Witzke | November 27, 2017
Ancient comedy was a thoroughly performative genre, meant to be seen and heard, not read. This point should be obvious, but it can easily get lost in a traditional college or university course on comedy in translation, given the textual nature of the transmission of comedies, their distance in time and culture, the difficulties presented by translated material, and the demands and traditions of teaching Greek and Roman literature generally. In this post I describe a comedy-in-performance assignment that T.H.M Gellar-Goad and I created and have used in teaching general-education courses at two different American universities. One of us employed it in lieu of the usual final exam and term paper; the other was bound by writing seminar standards to include a term paper in addition to the performance project.
Blog: Roman Fire, Texan Flood—Discussing Ancient Disasters in the Classroom
By Jane Millar | October 30, 2017
On a summer night in 64 CE a conflagration that would be remembered as the Great Fire of Rome began somewhere in the tightly-packed shops and streets around the Circus Maximus. “A disaster,” the historian Tacitus called it, “graver and more dreadful than all that have befallen this city by the violence of fire” (Annals 15.38). His account goes on to describe panic and destruction, followed by rumors, resentment, and rebuilding. Ancient responses to disasters like these are the focus of a new first-year studies course at the University of Texas at Austin, for which I am the teaching assistant.
Blog: Ancient Worlds—Defining Global Antiquity in Singapore
By Mira Seo | October 9, 2017
August 2012: a Latinist, a scholar of Chinese martial arts novels, a classical Persianist, a historian of early Vietnam, a Renaissance literature scholar, an archaeologist of pre-modern Malaya, and a post-colonial literature specialist assembled in New Haven. It was just like a gathering of Marvel’s AvengersTM, but with less spandex. We gathered not to save the world, but to read it: in their Olympian wisdom (to mix mythological universes), President Richard Levin of Yale University and President Tan Chorh Chuan of National University of Singapore had decided to establish Yale-NUS College, a jointly founded small liberal arts college located in Singapore.
Amphora: Flipping a Coin—Building a Numismatic Database with Undergraduate Researchers
By Julie Langford | October 2, 2017
This article was originally published in Amphora 11.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions.
That sinking feeling when you realize you’ve completely underestimated the scope of a project? I’m far more familiar with it than I’d like to admit. It was what I felt when I began analyzing the data I gathered in the library and vaults of the American Numismatic Society on provincial coinage minted under the Severan dynasty. I’d received a grant from my home institution to place the images and legends on provincial coinage in conversation with that of imperial coinage. I thought by doing so, I could bring to life the negotiations of ideology between local concerns and imperial propaganda.
Review: Latin Scansion App
By Patrick Hogan | September 18, 2017
Intermediate Latin students typically encounter Latin poetry for the first time with Vergil’s Aeneid. After a brief tutorial on the rules and patterns of dactylic hexameter, they plunge in with arma virumque cano. They learn scansion not only for the sake of tradition and proper understanding of the poem, but also so that they can appreciate its rhythms and artistry—the same reasons English teachers have for teaching their students iambic pentameter for Shakespeare. The symphony of “longs and shorts” can seem forbidding to students at first, and the remedy for this is most often simply practice. Today, given the convenience of phone and tablet apps, and their potential to transform idle moments of otium into more productive ones, the Pericles Group, LLC has created the Latin Scansion App to help Latin AP students practice scanning Vergil.
Blog: Virtual Reality Pompeii
By Rhodora Vennarucci | August 28, 2017
Blog: Approaching Classical Persian
By Gregory Crane | August 7, 2017
The English academic term Classics has conventionally designated the study of Ancient Greek and Classical Latin. The department from which I received both of my academic degrees makes the point explicit: its official name is “the Department of the Classics.” The department focuses upon Greek and Latin and the addition of the definite article asserts that these are the only Classical languages.
Blog: Digital Reading in Leipzig and Tehran—A Research Agenda
By Gregory Crane | June 5, 2017
Digital technology can support the emergence of a new kind of environment for reading, exploring, and thinking about classical texts—even those in unfamiliar languages. But realizing the ambitious goals for the new reading modalities, described in an earlier post, is a non-trivial task and requires research of various types.
Blog: Video Games and Ancient War—Gaming as Pedagogy
By Sarah Murray | May 1, 2017
War and games have much in common: multiple contestants compete to win within a physically determined set of realities, each using strategies that are frequently buffeted by interventions of chance and chaos. It is no surprise, then, that war games have been used as predictive tools by military leaders since at least the early 19th century (see the recent collection Zones of Control [2016]). Less familiar is the idea of using games as reconstructive tools in academic military history, although the ancient historian Philip Sabin (Lost Battles [2009]; Simulating War [2014]) has done excellent work on this topic.