The Center for Hellenic Studies would like to express their thanks and appreciation
to all those who participated in this summer’s Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) seminar. This year’s participants worked their way through 18 dramas written by Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles, as well as excerpts from Sappho, Herodotus, Bacchylides, and the Partheneion as they discovered new ways to present these texts to college students across the country.
This year we were pleased to have 18 professors from various disciplines join us for the seminar. Specialties included humanities, English, interdisciplinary studies, theatre and performing arts, dance, Bible and religion, and Classics.
Because music, song, and dance were essential elements of Athenian drama, participants explored the performative aspects of these dramas and compared the choral song making of the dramatists to the approaches of other contemporary composers of tragedy and comedy. Participants assumed a very active role in these explorations as they performed various, and numerous, choral readings and movement based presentations, such as a Qigong demonstration, in order to better visualize the words on the page.
Topics of discussion included choral poetry and the evolution of Athenian drama, ancient historical perspective, cultural contexts, choruses of women, ancient drama in opera and film, and many more.
At the end of the seminar, the group shared observations and ideas about the dramas they want to teach in the coming academic year, as well as the methodologies of those potential courses.
We would like to extend a special thanks to Prof. Gregory Nagy from Harvard University and Prof. Kenny Morrell from Rhodes College for their work as directors of this year’s CIC seminar.
The following professors were in attendance: Patricia Bart (Hillsdale College), Megan Burnett (Bellarmine University), Kristin Czarnecki (Georgetown College), Travis Derico (Huntington College), Kate Egerton (Berea College), Ryan Fowler (Franklin & Marshall College), Sheila Gordon (St. Edward’s University), Mitchell Harris (Augustana College), Alan Litsey (Birmingham-Southern College), Judy Myers (Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota), William Nesbitt (Beacon College), Amanda Ogden-Kellogg (LaGrange College), Paul Robertson (Colby-Sawyer College), Irina Rodimtseva (Alderson Broaddus University), Carrie Rohman (Lafayette College), W. Lee Templeton (North Carolina Wesleyan College), Kathleen Walkner (Silver Lake College of the Holy Family), and Richard Wolf-Spencer (Elizabethtown College).
For more information about the CIC, visit their website. If you are interested in participating in future CIC seminars or any of our other educational programs, please feel free to contact us.