SCS Blog Author Page
Posts by Ellen Bauerle
|
Changing the Guard at Amphora
by Dr. Ellen Bauerle After five years seeing the ebb and flow of classical practitioners’ thoughts about outreach, it’s time for me to step down as editor of Amphora. I have very much enjoyed working with the many members of the Amphora editorial board – I’ve made some good new friends, learned about a lot of things going on in the international ferment we call classical studies – and made new discoveries about current pedagogical trends. In the last five years Amphora has moved from an all-print publication format, then to print + website, and now to website-only: I am sure there will be additional developments upcoming as Amphora continues to change and adapt. It’s hard to say goodbye, but I am delighted to announce that Dr. Wells Hansen, who has been my efficient and hard-working assistant editor, is taking over as editor of Amphora, effective with the next issue. Wells and I are together putting the current issue to bed, but as Read more … |
|
Amphora: How to Use the Exhibit Hall at the Annual Meeting
This article was originally published on the Amphora blog on January 6, 2016. If you’re new to academic conferences, or to the joint annual meeting of the SCS/AIA, you may be thinking that the Exhibit Hall is mostly for buying books. And if you’re at the start of your career and/or on a modest budget, you may think that there’s nothing for you in the Exhibit Hall as a result. Au contraire! Here’s a short list of things you can do there—completely aside from buying books—that can be beneficial to your career, fun, interesting, worthwhile, and generally good things to do. The Exhibit Hall is generally open about nine hours a day for the two full days of the conference, plus a half day on either side, so there’s plenty of time to try these in small bits. As a press exhibitor myself (full disclosure) I spend many hours in the hall, so I have a chance to see the variety of exhibitors Read more … |
|
Amphora: Learn to Spend the Big Money: Medievalists Mary Carruthers, Irina Dumitrescu, and Barbara Rosenwein on Humanities Outreach
This article was originally published in Amphora 12.1. It has been edited slightly to adhere to current SCS blog conventions. This spring I was fortunate to hear an interesting panel discussion—stand-up-and-take-notice interesting—at the Medieval Academy of America’s annual meeting, hosted by Notre Dame University. The panelists’ observations seemed to me relevant to the SCS both as demonstrating additional kinds of outreach but more importantly as discussing the peculiar period higher education now finds itself in, and what might be done about that at every level, from junior scholar to dean. Officially the panelists spoke in the context of medieval studies, but they mentioned classical studies at different points, and the vast majority of their comments would be applicable to nearly any department in the humanities, especially those involved with “old stuff” or those commonly regarded by the Read more … |
How to Use the Exhibit Hall at the Annual Meeting
If you’re new to academic conferences, or to the joint annual meeting of the SCS/AIA, you may be thinking that the Exhibit Hall is mostly for buying books. And if you’re at the start of your career and/or on a modest budget, you may think that there’s nothing for you in the Exhibit Hall as a result. Au contraire! Here’s a short list of things you can do there—completely aside from buying books—that can be beneficial to your career, fun, interesting, worthwhile, and generally good things to do. The Exhibit Hall is generally open about nine hours a day for the two full days of the conference, plus a half day on either side, so there’s plenty of time to try these in small bits. As a press exhibitor myself (full disclosure) I spend many hours in the hall, so I have a chance to see the variety of exhibitors who transport their materials or goods or information to the conference, often from international origins, in hopes they’ll have an opportunity to talk with you. One set of Read more … |
|
There Is a Shortage of Certified Latin Teachers: Please Spread the Word!
by Ronnie Ancona and Kathleen Durkin There is a shortage of certified Latin teachers in the United States. Latin teaching positions at the precollegiate level sometimes cannot be filled for lack of qualified applicants. In New York State, for example, where we both teach, in 2012-2013 and 2013-2014, Latin was named specifically as a language with a teacher shortage by the United States Department of Education Office of Postsecondary Education (http://tinyurl.com/mwgdr9j). Not filling a Latin position can result in one of several negative outcomes: the end of a Latin program, the inability to start one, or difficulty with sustaining one. None of these situations is good for maintaining strength in classics at the precollegiate level, where many of our students are first introduced to their excitement about our field. While the shortage does not affect every part of the country equally, it is sufficiently widespread to pose a Read more … |
|
Editing for Good
Elsewhere in this issue, in his article titled The Metal Age, Kris Fletcher discusses the relationship between classical studies and heavy metal music. Examining various metal appropriations of themes, characters, and ideas from classical antiquity, some less orthodox than others, Fletcher notes, “… these songs should remind us that we as classicists do not control this material.” On the SCS website, Mary-Kay Gamel and the Outreach Committee have voiced a similar view concerning the shared understanding of classical material: “We use the word ‘outreach’ not to suggest a one-way communication in which scholars inform others, but a complex interaction in which all involved contribute to a discussion of what Classics is and what it might be.” Not surprisingly, then, in January the Outreach Committee enjoyed a lively discussion of the role of professional classicists and their students as editors of Wikipedia articles on classical subjects. Wikipedia Read more … |
|
The Metal Age: The Use of Classics in Heavy Metal Music
It is a great time to be a fan of both the Classical world and heavy metal music: the two have never overlapped to the extent that they do right now. Consider, for example, the fact that in 2013 not one but two Italian metal bands, Heimdall and Stormlord, released concept albums based on Vergil’s Aeneid. But this overlap is not a new phenomenon—in fact, far from it. Heavy metal music has drawn on the Classical world almost from its very beginnings, and this interest in the Classical world is part of a larger obsession with other times and places—both real and imagined— that is a defining characteristic of the genre. And since metal is a conservative genre (there are clear forefathers to whom almost all subsequent bands owe and acknowledge their allegiance), the interest in these kinds of subjects by earlier bands sanctioned continuous use of them by all subsequent bands. To simplify radically, metal begins in 1969-70, with the debut of the two main Read more … |
|
Tartarus and the Curses of Percy Jackson (or Annabeth’s Adventures in the Underworld)
by Thomas D Kohn A few years ago, I adopted the Anthology of Classical Myth, edited by SM Trzaskoma, RS Smith, and S Brunet (Hackett, 2004), for my Greek and Roman mythology course. And so, some months before the start of the semester, I read through the text, in order to familiarize myself with the selections. At the same time, I began to read the “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series by Rick Riordan. I was amazed by the degree to which the two complemented each other. I like to drive home to my students the point that writers in antiquity did not feel obligated to adhere to one particular version of a myth (for example, the various depictions of Prometheus by Aeschylus, Hesiod, and Plato), and in fact both retained certain details and also made certain changes based on their literary agenda. Part of the delight, therefore, in reading renditions of Greek myth, both ancient and modern, lies not in labeling departures as “wrong,” but in comparing them Read more … |
|
For the Girls: An Elegy
In 1954, the girls went out to play “She’s always got her nose in a book,” their mothers said, Serious girls, or rowdy, they got straight A’s, Once they wore red Keds, and collected barrettes; Now it is summer again, and the trees cast Read more … |
|
Our Paths to Classics
Your Amphora staff members are pleased to bring you this new issue, in print and digital formats. At the initiative of Executive Director Adam Blistein, we have been developing ways to bring materials to you in both formats, much as we did in our most recent issue, as a way of leveraging the benefits of print and digital presentation. In this issue, KFB Fletcher (Louisiana State University) examines the considerable crossover that classical studies makes into the world of metal, or heavy metal, music. He surveys their use of Latin, and the reuse of mythical themes and plot elements from authors and works we know well, as well as people and events from ancient history. His piece includes hyperlinks to samples of “classical” metal music, so readers may care to visit the version of his article on the SCS’s blog, where the links are of course live and clickable, although those reading Amphora in PDF format will also find these links (and others Read more … |