CLST 330 – Classical Studies Today: Writing for a General Audience

This will be a seminar for junior and senior departmental majors, offered in association with the Calderwood Seminars in Public Writing. The purpose of the class is to have students write about scholarly issues in a way that makes them accessible to broad non-specialist audiences. This practice is what one scholar has called “responsible popularization.” The course will concentrate on writing and public presentations, and each week the students will take alternating roles as writers and editors. The work load consists of reading scholarly articles or book chapters, on academic topics from Classical Studies, and re-work them in compact genres like personal essays, op-eds, blog posts,and reviews. For the final project, the students will form teams of two, each of which will interview an eminent Classical scholar of their choice and produce a brief profile.