Classical Studies Now: Trends, Techniques, and Tools

Latin prose composition courses remain a fixture of many classics programs and not without a wide-ranging, decades-spanning debate on the effectiveness and utility of such courses (Ball and Ellsworth 1989; Newman 1990; Saunders 1993; Meinking 2017). Alongside this debate has arisen a number of assignments and activities designed to bolster effectiveness and make the practice of writing in Latin more relevant to as many students as possible (Davisson 2000; Fogel 2002; Dugdale 2011; Trego 2014; Gellar-Goad 2015; Kershner 2019; Barrett 2020).

In this talk I will present the digital outcome of the The Aratus Project, an NSF-supported project which has produced a complete translation of all the exegetical texts connected with Aratus: all the scholia, Hipparchus’ Commentary on Aratus and Eudoxus, the treatises of Achilles, Leontius, and other anonymous treatises as well as the Vitae of Aratus and Eratosthenes’ Catasterismi. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has cast a light on inequalities deepening throughout the United States to such an extent that continuing to ignore them has become an impossibility. These inequalities extend to education at large and independent education specifically.

In this talk, we will describe the recent creation of a digital Hawaiian-English classics-themed dictionary and how the dictionary can be used to study the reception of classical culture in 19th century Hawaiʻi. We will start by providing some examples of classical reception in 19th century Hawaiʻi--e.g. the Punahou School curriculum and the use of the Prima Porta Augustus as the primary model for the Kamehameha statue in Downtown Honolulu--and the cultural and political forces that contributed to their creation.

This paper reports the first steps of a project that aims to offer an open-access online database in which users will be able to see, analyze, and calculate how meters are used throughout Greek and Roman theater.