A few professors in a variety of departments at Conn seem to become institutions in those departments: we often choose classes, and even majors and minors, because we want to work with a given professor. Given the practice of tenure in higher education in the U.S., we often expect the professors in a department to never change; the academic job market is so hard, so why would you move? “As it was in the beginning, it is now until” … when?
The Classics department, however, has changed very much over the last year or so. For a variety of reasons, no professors that were here in Spring 2013 are here now, and everyone here now wasn’t here then. Turnover does happen, despite (and because of) tenure. But it doesn’t typically happen this drastically. When we talk of rebuilding departments, we’re discussing how to integrate world literature more fully into the English department, or how to restructure the Education department’s student advisory board. The Classics Department right now, though, is entirely new. So it was a great time to sit down and interview each of the professors.
Since arriving at Conn last fall, Professor Tobias Myers has taught ancient Greek, Latin poetry, Greek and Roman history classes, a first year seminar on Socrates, and a course about the genre of the classical epic. He’s a Homeric scholar – but his serious alternative to Classics was becoming a wilderness survival guide.
But while in Patagonia as part of a National Outdoor Leadership School course, with Ovid’s Metamorphoses and chocolate bars he realized that he was too “absent-minded” to last long in that career. The parallel to Alexander the Great sleeping with the Iliad under his pillow is entertaining nonetheless.
After this realization that a career as everyone’s guide in the wilderness wasn’t going to work out (and dropping out of college to try his hand at chess), Myers went to graduate school. When not reading the Iliad in ancient Greek while listening to Rachmaninoff and drinking tea, he took painting courses to “[get himself] through grad school,” acted in Oedipus and other plays in their original ancient Greek, and taught, which for him is “the most joyous activity.” And it’s not just college Classics courses that he’s taught; Myers has spent some time as a preschool teacher, an experience he loved but found emotionally exhausting.
With all of these possible avenues that Professor Myers pursued at various points, why, I asked, did he settle on Classics instead of another occupation? Why ancient Greek? Why Homer? For him, Classics as a field “demands” that he engage in a variety of other fields; its cohesiveness lies in its time period and geographic area rather than in its subject matter. He’s fascinated by Homer because of the blanks in current knowledge about the time period, which allow him to use imagination, but with evidence; there’s “something about the search for origins,” he said, about the Iliad and the Odyssey being “so alien and so familiar” that is intriguing.
Professor Darryl Phillips is even newer to the Department, joining as chair this fall after sixteen years at the College of Charleston. Having established himself as a scholar, he relishes the opportunity to work more closely with pupils than Charleston allowed as a school with over 11,000 students. And the rare opportunity to help completely rebuild a department was not something he wanted to pass up.
Phillips’ interest came later than many classicists’, and, somewhat unusually, not initially through Latin or Greek. Instead, his introduction was hearing a lecture about women in the Roman world during the first semester of his freshman year.
Apart from Latin and Greek, Professor Phillips teaches about the Roman family and Ancient Greek history. His research, which he tries to write in a way “that … can be understood by an informed general audience” – including his students – focuses on Rome; he enjoys working with the ruins, artifacts, and legal texts that are our evidence about that society. But, as Professor Myers mentioned in relation to Ancient Greece, we have relatively little information about Rome too, and so must use the evidence creatively. A particularly surprising example of that creativity that Phillips offered is that classicists use the UN’s life expectancy data for developing countries in order to determine what ancient Romans’ might have been – and it’s believed to be fairly accurate.
When not teaching or researching, Phillips likes to travel, as well as cook a lot of Italian food. He finds the latter an “unwinding at the end of the day.” On recent trips, he’s visited Spain, and New Zealand via Hawaii. A visual person, he tries to combine seeing the buildings and terrain of a place with learning about its history. While in New Zealand, Phillips realized that Kiwis had embraced the Lord of the Rings films, even locating the Plains of Rohan in their country’s geography; he doubts that Americans, by contrast, would generally wish to connect their culture quite so completely to a commercial film franchise.
Professor Nina Papathanasopoulou came to Conn last fall, and teaches Latin and Greek, as well as courses in translation exploring ancient drama and classical mythology.
She grew up in Greece and credits her heritage for influencing her interest in Classics. The field also manages to bring together other interests of hers, including those of theater and dance. “Always interested in Greek theater,” as a child she attended performances of Greek tragedy at the ancient theater in Epidaurus weekly during the summer months. She also studied jazz, modern, and ballet dance, a background which influences her academic interests; in a future project, she wants to explore how Greek myths have been expressed and interpreted through the choreography of Martha Graham.
Papathanasopoulou has “always loved languages,” in part because “they can express themselves in a completely different way” from each other. In her introductory Latin class she wants her students to notice the nuances in the different ways something is expressed in Latin, why the passage reads the way that it does. Could it suggest the Roman society’s attitudes towards the subject?
As a graduate student, she choreographed the staging of Greek plays performed in Ancient Greek, and her dissertation was based in three comedies by Aristophanes: The Acharnians, The Knights, and The Wasps. She looked at “how … [the] staging of [the] civic and domestic spheres can … add to our understanding of the relationship between … [those] spheres.”
But why Classics in particular out of all fields? Like Phillips, Papathanasopoulou feels that Classics, because of its temporal distance, allows her to “reflect about [her] own issues but” with a certain amount of comfort. Comedy, for her, is “a place where all of these fears, anxieties, worries can … be talked [about] openly.” Reading the works, which are “all about how to cope with meaningful events in one’s life, … [and about] human relationships,” lends a sense of perspective. “Maybe it makes your own life easier,” Papathanasopoulou suggested, to realize that others have the same experience.
“It’s very important,” Professor Papathanasopoulou mentioned, “to live a life where you can connect well with the people around you.” •
