This summer, I was fortunate enough to participate in the Summer Session at the American School for Classical Studies in Athens with the help of travel funding from Duke’s Department of Classical Studies. The ASCSA Summer Session is a six-week program in which students travel throughout Greece visiting archaeological sites, monuments, and museums from Crete up to Thessaloniki. My nineteen peers and I, under the leadership of Professors Amy C. Smith (University of Reading) and Amelia Brown (University of Queensland), were able to vastly expand our knowledge of all regions and eras of Greek antiquity.
Through this program, I gained a much greater understanding of the context surrounding the texts which I study. Visiting theaters, whether large ones such as those in Ephesus or Athens or smaller ones like that in Thorikos, granted me deeper knowledge of the experiences of both staging and viewing ancient drama. Exploring ancient sanctuaries such as those in Dion, Brauron, and Eleusis, as well as examining the votive offerings found at these locations in museums, allowed me to better conceptualize the religious experiences of those living in ancient Greece. Furthermore, seeing active archaeological sites, such as the Athenian Agora, and hearing about the process of organizing and conducting archaeological digs granted me a more thorough understanding and appreciation of how knowledge about the past is produced through the unearthing and analysis of material culture. This is a vital part of the study of the ancient Mediterranean, and I now feel better equipped to understand scholarship on archaeological evidence of the past.
The ASCSA Summer Session also allowed me to further practice my research and teaching skills, as each student had to give two site reports during the program. After reading scholarship on my assigned sites, the Basilica of St. Titus in Gortyn and the Pythian Oracle at Delphi, and synthesizing the information into fifteen-minute talks with accompanying handouts, I lectured about both of these topics on-site to my peers and professors. This process helped me prepare to lecture to students as a T.A. in the short-term and hopefully as a professor in the long-term. Thanks to the generosity of the Duke Department of Classical Studies in making the Summer Session possible to attend, I now feel that I am a more qualified scholar and instructor of antiquity.
Classical Studies
