Christian Sheridan, an associate professor of English at Bridgewater College, is one of a select group of faculty members nationwide chosen by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and the Center for Hellenic Studies to participate in an Ancient Greece in the Modern Classroom seminar on Homer’s Odyssey.
From a pool of 66 faculty members nominated, CIC and the Center for Hellenic Studies selected 20 faculty members to participate in “The Odyssey,” a five-day seminar that will take place July 22–26, at the 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 seminar is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“I’m very honored to be chosen to participate in the CIC seminar on the Odyssey, and I’m looking forward to working with colleagues from around the country to further my knowledge of this classic text and to bring that knowledge back to BC and share it with the students in my classes,” said Sheridan.
Designed for non-specialists, the seminar will address the challenge of keeping alive in undergraduate education classical texts such as the Iliad, Odyssey, Homeric Hymns, poetry of Hesiod and Histories of Herodotus that a generation ago were read and understood by every college graduate.
The seminar will examine the many dimensions of the Odyssey in its various historical contexts and explore how the poem can be studied in courses that address a variety of literatures and disciplines.
The Council of Independent Colleges is an association of 744 nonprofit independent colleges and universities and higher education affiliates and organizations that has worked since 1956 to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of private higher education’s contributions to society.
Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies was founded by means of an endowment made “exclusively for the establishment of an educational center in the field of Hellenic Studies designed to rediscover the humanism of the Hellenic Greeks.”
Bridgewater College is a private, four-year liberal arts college located in the Central Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Founded in 1880, it was the state’s first private, coeducational college. Today, Bridgewater College is home to approximately 1,800 undergraduate students.
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