Once again those Classics faculty in Northfield for some chunk of the summer enjoyed and profited from the opportunity to read selected articles and discuss them with each other. While our selection of readings was inspired generally by teaching or research we are all thinking about, the conversations we had were wide-ranging and included specific courses happening this year, potential courses for the future, and areas and methodologies we have used or are contemplating using in our research. Each of us suggested readings for one session, so our focus shifted markedly from one week to the next. But one of the most stimulating aspects of the reading and discussion we undertook this summer was digging into a number of texts from outside of our field, and exploring the possible connections with Classics these offered both within and beyond our classrooms.
At our initial meeting we discussed a Nathan Heller piece from the New Yorker called “The Battle for Attention” as well as one of the academic studies of attention there cited, by Yves Citton: “Restructuring the attention economy: Literary interpretation as an antidote to mass media distraction.” Readers of this blog will understand how our attention was captured by this latter title! While all of us integrate instruction and practice with focus into our courses with varying degrees of explicitness, these pieces sparked a great discussion on ways of thinking about this increasingly urgent topic, particularly in the context of beginning or advanced level language classes, as well as the possibility of an A&I on attention.
Another meeting also considered a text from outside of Classics: Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score. This book lays out current science on how the brain and body respond to and process strong emotion and trauma. Clara has been exploring ancient emotions in her research over the past several years, but will be teaching Ovid’s Metamorphoses this winter and is intrigued at the possibility of reading this ancient narrative of bodily transformations, at least in part, as representing responses to trauma.
Jake will be teaching our senior seminar in the fall on “Food and Foodways” in the ancient world, and is in the process of determining readings for that course. So for his week, we read a series of articles on taste in the ancient world, from a collection called Taste and the Ancient Senses (work emerging from a recent “turn” in Classics toward the senses). Alongside these pieces we read an anthropological investigation of food production from a collection called Bad Year Economics: Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty (Halstead and O’Shea, eds). We discussed the ways in which these pieces could help our seniors see a sliver of the dazzling variety of ways scholars approach the broad area of food studies, and how these might fit into the larger themes and rhythms of the course.