Caldwell University is pleased to announce that Rosa Sanchez, associate professor of Spanish language, literature and culture, is one of a select group of faculty members nationwide chosen by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies to participate in an Ancient Greece in the Modern Classroom seminar, “The Ancient Greek Hero.”
CIC and the Center for Hellenic Studies recently selected 20 faculty members out of 42 highly competitive nominations to participate in the seminar, which will take place July 25–29, at Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies campus in Washington, D.C. Gregory Nagy, Francis Jones Professor of Classical Greek Literature and professor of comparative literature at Harvard University, and Kenneth Scott Morrell, associate professor of Greek and Roman studies at Rhodes College, will lead the seminar. The program is generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“Strengthening the teaching of the classics at colleges and universities is of critical importance. This seminar series addresses the challenge of keeping alive in undergraduate education classical texts that generations ago were read and understood by every college graduate,” said CIC President Richard Ekman. “We believe that Dr. Rosa Sanchez will contribute to the seminar in meaningful ways and learn much that will energize teaching when she returns home.”
Sanchez, of Verona, teaches Greek literature in her Spanish and Latin American literature courses. Dr. Barbara Chesler, Caldwell University’s vice president for academic affairs, is delighted for Sanchez and how the seminar will align with Sanchez’s research and teaching. Chesler pointed out that in Sanchez’s Spanish and Latin American Literature class she teaches how Aristotle’s “Poetics” influenced the Spanish Enlightenment movement. “Through discussion, students discover the core issues of antiquity and how they are still the same in modern society. This amazes the Generation Z student,” said Chesler. “This seminar will assist Dr. Sanchez in pursuing the Greek “hero” and various Greek writers in-depth with other scholars and will provide the opportunity for her to further study the Greek hero in poetry, history, and philosophy.”
Designed primarily for non-specialists, the seminar will explore what it means to be human. The organizing principle will be the study of a model of humanity, the hērōs (hero), as it can be reconstructed by way of textual evidence attesting to myths and rituals from throughout the ancient Greek-speaking world. Beginning with the Homeric poems, the seminar also will engage with works of Sappho, Herodotus, Hesiod, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Plato, providing participants who teach in a variety of disciplines with approaches to integrate the literature of ancient Greece into a wide range of courses.
For more than ten years, CIC has collaborated with the Center for Hellenic Studies to provide seminars on teaching the classics for small and mid-sized independent colleges that have a limited number of faculty members or courses in the classics. The seminar is ideal for faculty members who have been trained in other disciplines and who seek opportunities to explore major classical texts and learn new ways to teach these texts to undergraduates.
