The Society for Classical Studies is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024 Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics at the College Level:
Please click each name above to read the full award citations. To learn more about the awards and to see a list of previous recipients, visit the Awards for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics at the College Level page.
Fred Drogula
We are proud to recognize Fred Drogula for his contributions to Classics and the broader humanities at Ohio University, where he serves both as faculty in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies and as director of the Charles J. Ping Institute for the Teaching of the Humanities. Professor Drogula has been actively engaged in realigning the department’s curriculum to reflect changing student interests and movements in scholarship. He has dramatically enhanced student engagement with the ancient world by creating new courses like “The Ancient World in Cinema” and reworking existing offerings like “Women in the Ancient Mediterranean” to draw a wider range of student interest.
Students celebrate Professor Drogula’s ability to foster dialogue even on challenging subjects. Students comment that “he creates a space where one is allowed to make mistakes without feeling judged or belittled,” and that he “does not strike down any opinions and observations, instead he extracts value in each point and finds a way for everyone to contribute to class discussions.” His courses are challenging and require students to grapple with a wide range of ancient texts, but he provides exceptionally clear rubrics and assignment instructions that enable students to rise to the challenge, and students comment that despite their initial anxiety or lack of confidence, they found the clarity of class discussions and extensive feedback on formative assessments led them to surprise themselves with their own success.
A particularly remarkable feature of Professor Drogula’s portfolio is his ability to combine a strong commitment to teaching with a heavy load of institutional responsibilities. Rather than diverting his attention from Classics, his role as director of the Ping Institute has created opportunities to ignite student interest in the Classics and the humanities more broadly. One student comments that “he is the single most prominent advocate to our university for the humanities,” including making many “conversions” to Classics majors. So strong is his commitment to teaching that in addition to his regular teaching and administrative responsibilities, he regularly teaches Greek and Latin courses as overloads, as well as serving as the faculty advisor to the Classics and Religious Studies Club and a new club focused on monster literature.
While Professor Drogula arrived at Ohio University already a seasoned teacher, he has missed no opportunities to continue to develop his skills. He comments that his role as director of the Ping Institute has allowed him to come into contact with faculty from a broad range of disciplines and learn from them to incorporate new methods and concepts into his courses, particularly in the digital humanities. Students praise his incorporation of novel teaching techniques like “The Game,” which he borrowed from his dissertation advisor and uses in his “Democracy and Republicanism in the Ancient World” course. Students are assigned a historical figure to role-play in a political contest that evolves over the whole semester. One student comments that “The Game” left them not only with a deep and detailed knowledge of their character (Pompey), but also with friendships that have lasted for years and deepened through many more courses with Professor Drogula.
One of his strongest pedagogical commitments has been enhancing the availability of Classics-focused writing instruction both through his own coursework and curriculum reforms. He designed a brand new course on “Writing in Classics and Religious Studies” which is taught by various faculty members in the department, serving his goal of ensuring that Classics students are able “to learn how effective evidence-based arguments are constructed and how weak arguments are taken apart, and to understand how human emotion is swayed with both oral and written words.” His focus on sharpening his students’ skills in critically analyzing rhetoric could hardly be more timely. He also finds opportunities to introduce other forms of writing into his courses, like creative writing assignments in his course “The Ancient World in Cinema,” where students praised his assignment to write a film treatment of a myth of their own choosing as a “unique” opportunity that “folded in creative writing” in a way that most Classics students do not experience.
Professor Drogula has devoted a great deal of energy not only in recruiting students to the study of Classics, but encouraging them to see how their study of the ancient world can lead to a very broad range of future opportunities. One student comments, “I never even imagined I could be a published author, but Dr. Drogula has provided me the confidence and insight to support that new ambition,” while another remarks, “I do not believe I would have the opportunities I now have in my senior year of college if Professor Drogula had not invested so much time into helping me figure out what my path for the future will be.”
Mark Nugent
Dr. Mark Nugent describes teaching not merely as a job or indeed part of a job but as a vocation, and that framing radiates through all the facets of his work as a teacher-scholar. As an associate teaching professor at the University of Victoria, Nugent brings a brilliant combination of pedagogical know-how, a strong sense of humanity, and an infectious passion for the serious study of Classics that inspires and motivates students.
Active learning is one of the hallmarks of Nugent’s course implementation. Every course, from beginning Latin and Greek to larger “lecture” courses like “The Ancient World on Film” and “Love, Sex, and the Body in the Ancient World” see students collaborating, discussing, and debating with each other. Nugent leverages the power of social influences on learning and shares his joy in “moving around the classroom, making connections with students, and inspiring intellectual exchange—that is, in cultivating a community of active learners.” Whether he’s playing VINCO (think ‘BINGO’) with his Latin students, or having students collaboratively read original short stories in ancient languages or debating the way a particular text engages with ideas of sexuality or gender, Nugent is always pushing his students to take an active role in their own education.
When Nugent focuses on providing students the context or content needed to do these active tasks, he is equally compelling. Students describe him as “an energetic and engaging storyteller”, “an extremely gifted orator”, and an “engaging lecturer [with] passion for the subject.” In fact, for Nugent (though not for most of us) it is not uncommon that students completing student Course Experience Surveys suggest “longer class sessions” as a way the course could be improved.
Students also provide numerous anecdotes illustrating how Nugent’s teaching is sensitive and adaptive to student experiences. Not only does Nugent make adjustments to his course semester to semester, he regularly corrects course throughout the semester, using both direct student feedback and suggestions as well as his own observations to create more effective and impactful learning experiences. In the course of the last few years, with the challenges brought by the transition to teaching remotely and then back into the classroom, the need for such careful and prompt adjustment has never been greater.
Given his academic specialty in gender and sexuality in the ancient world, it is perhaps not surprising that Dr. Nugent handles such challenging material with care and precision in his own presentations, but again students testify to the ways in which he creates space for difficult discussions in the classroom, setting clear expectations for respectful engagement and a practice of “charitable listening”, thereby giving students the space needed to speak imperfectly about multi-faceted issues that connect ancient and modern experiences .
The same care goes into Nugent’s support of students with disabilities. By employing a Universal Design for Learning framework, and framing syllabi with flexibility for student agency and a variety of learning activities, Nugent sets students up for success. Moreover, his students testify to the work he puts into understanding the challenges individual students face and designing or adapting courses to enable them meet core learning outcomes that otherwise might have been impossible.
Dr. Nugents’s syllabi prove the careful design that goes into them, with thoughtful interweaving of foundational primary sources, up-to-the-moment dips into relevant secondary scholarship, and opportunities for reflection on the contemporary resonances and echoes of antiquity. As he himself puts it, “Students in my classes know that they are never just learning about the ancient world.” This dual focus on the “now” as well as the “then” is clearly wildly successful in motivating students (From graduate students to undergraduate beginners) to find all the richness Classics has to offer and to continue engaging with it.
Though we might have chosen any of a number of hyperbolically effusive statements of praise with which to end this citation, perhaps the clearest is this short student comment: “just good teaching.” Nugent is a consummate practitioner of “just good teaching” and for that reason among others, the SCS is delighted to honor Dr. Mark Nugent with the 2024 Award for Excellence in Teaching of the Classics at the College and University Level.
