SCS Blog Author Page
Posts by Curtis Dozier
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Blog: Vox Populi: Podcasting and Equity at the SCS Annual Meeting
Last week the SCS blog reflected on what really does seem to be a golden age of Classics podcasting, where audio content that you can listen to on a portable device whenever convenient has made it easier than ever to teach people about ancient history, to help teachers develop the active use of ancient languages, and to share cutting edge research and scholarly perspectives on the material we study. Other indices of this flourishing in our field include the number of Read more … |
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Blog: Siliquasparsiones: Podcasts in Latin
In order to prepare for the SCS’s upcoming sesquicentennial at the annual meeting in San Diego from January 3–6, 2019, the SCS blog is highlighting panels, keynotes, and workshops from the schedule. This week we are focusing on the Podcasting the Classics panel (8:00am–10:30am on Saturday, Jan. 5) by pointing to some resources for those who want to explore the medium more fully. One of the best ways to build fluency in a language is to listen to that language being spoken at a comprehensible level of complexity. This is no less true for Latin than for any other language, but until recently the options for listening to Latin being spoken were limited, especially for those unable to travel to the various spoken-Latin colloquia around the country (e.g., the Paideia Institute’s “Living Latin,” Read more … |
A New Outlet for Classical Scholars to Publish Timely Writing (and get paid for it!)
Some time ago I expressed a hope that more classicists would write in public venues, so I was very excited when the Paideia Institute announced that they were launching Eidolon, a new online publication for timely writing by Classical Scholars. I’ve written here before about Paideia, which in my opinion is responsible for some of the most exciting new programming in our field, and Eidolon is no exception. I’m devoting this post to it not only because SCS members will enjoy what’s published there, but because I want to encourage you to think about contributing. It’s fun, fulfilling, and believe it or not, they’ll pay you. A platform devoted Read more … |
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Designing Classics Courses for "Significant Learning"
At the beginning of the summer I wrote about resources that have helped me with my writing and research. Now, as we start thinking about our classes for the Fall, I’d like to mention a book that has helped me understand the value of my work teaching the Classics and taught me to design classes that convey that value to students. My fellow blogger Ted Gellar-Goad recently wrote about the importance, and difficulty, of helping students “see value” in our courses. He rightly calls this “the hardest lever of motivation to pull.” And it’s not just students who need to see value. Amid the almost daily declarations of the death of the humanities (now, thankfully, becoming less frequent), I myself Read more … |
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Support for Summer Writing and Research
The summer is in full swing for most of us and those who for whatever personal or institutional reason (try to) maintain a research program are turning our thoughts to what we want to accomplish before classes start again. It’s exciting to be able to devote ourselves more fully to our writing and research, but the summer poses not only that opportunity but its own set of challenges: with so much unstructured time and so many appealing distractions it can easily slip away. Below I’m going to describe several books that I’ve found useful for developing and maintaining a research practice during summers and even during the semester. I’m not the most productive writer in the world but I’ve become much more productive from implementing many of the techniques in these books. This list should also be of interest to graduate students and early-career scholars who, like me, are still learning the technical aspects of participation in scholarly discourse. By “technical aspects” I’m Read more … |
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Language-Focused Summer Programs in Italy and Greece
In my post last month I referred to the crucial role that study abroad played in my formation as a classicist, and the papers delivered at a panel on study-abroad programs at this year’s annual meeting showed that I am not alone. Those papers (by McGinn, Severy-Hoven, Thakur, Morris, and Romano) spoke eloquently of the profound impact on students of exploring the remains of ancient Greece and Rome and their continuities with the present. It is easy to dismiss Read more … |
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A Healthy Dose of Skepticism...But No More
Garrett Fagan recently posed an interesting question in his very useful discussion of the crisis in the humanities: “should we embrace the competition for students in a marketplace of majors?” That my answer is “yes” is probably evident from my last post, in which I urged classicists to participate in public discourse in order to insure that the public image of Classics is both attractive to our students and acceptable to their parents. Not everyone shares this view. Many scholars cringe at the economic and corporate metaphors that often cluster around this issue (“competition,” “marketplace”) and worry about the dilution of rigor and intellectualism they connote. But in my view we do not need to choose between “giving the students what they want” and our core values as humanists. We Read more … |
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How I became a public intellectual and why you should too
OK, my title is a more than a little tongue in cheek. Blogging for the APA doesn’t make me a public intellectual. Nor does the one article I’ve published for a wider public, a piece on Petronius for Salon.com. But by the same token it seems to me that most professional classical scholars don't pursue publishing in such venues, and I think more of us should attempt it. There are a lot of reasons why we don't. We’re not trained to write for broad audiences, and the tenure and promotion system demands that we devote our energy to peer-reviewed publications. Most of us don't know how we would go about finding a venue (I got published on Salon by pure, naïve luck, a shot in the dark to a culture editor. There must be better ways to do it, and I now know that your college’s office of communications can help, but I would welcome an APA panel with advice from those who have actually done it). But I also Read more … |