News & Events

Stephanie McCarter, professor of Classics and Rachel Reynolds, German translator will speak about their experiences translating foreign texts-both ancient and modern.

Students were inducted into the national Classics honor society, Eta Sigma Phi, at the first in-person gathering since COVID-19.

Students worked hard practicing their songs in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Spanish.  Latin students sang Boulevard of Broken Dreams by Green Day.  There was food from around the world and prizes for best solo, small group, and whole class acts.  Read more to find out who won and hear a bit of their songs.

Stephanie McCarter's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses was published on Nov. 8 by Penguin Classics. This is the first translation of the epic into English by a woman in over 60 years. Read a recent interview with Professor McCarter about the translation and a review in The New Yorker.

Classics professor, Dr. Chris McDonough, with partner, Stephen Garrett have created the documentary, Ghosts of Lone Rock. There was a vast fortune to be made in the years after the Civil War from the untapped coal veins in eastern Tennessee, and all that was needed to extract it was a cheap source of labor. The owners of Tennessee Coal and Iron Company (TCI) worked with the state legislature to introduce the convict leasing system, in which the company would house convicts (mostly African-American) at its private prisons and force them to work in the mines virtually for free.  The Lone Rock Stockade in Tracy City was the largest of these private prisons, and its story is one of great misery for many, and great profit for others has not been told on film. Until now.

Join us for a night of fun, food, music, and prizes! Brave students will sing in the language that they are studying at Sewanee. Get your name on the roster to sing by contacting Helen Stapleton hfstaple@sewanee.edu

Pontius Pilate on Screen: Sinner, Soldier, Superstar deals with one of history's most controversial characters. From Monty Python's Life of Brian to Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, Pontius Pilate is a figure of evidently endless fascination to filmmakers. The Roman prefect is depicted at times as the hapless victim of machinations beyond his control and at other times as the heartless villain of the piece. If in films about the Passion Jesus represents eternal truth, Pilate symbolises the values of the present – whether it is the lingering trauma of the Holocaust, the ongoing struggle over Civil Rights or the polarised politics of the current day – as filmmakers endeavour again and again to portray in Pontius Pilate a compelling counter-figure to Jesus himself.

The Department of Classical Languages hosts a public conversation/webinar entitled, Sex, Rage, & Change: Feminist Adaptation of Ovid's Metamorphoses conducted by Nina McLaughlin, Paisley Rekdal, and Stephanie McCarter.

Students gathered at Cravens Hall for the The 6th Annual International Karaoke Night on Saturday, October 24.  It was a little different from past International Karaoke Nights when students sang live in front of a panel of judges and an audience.  Instead,  they submitted videos of themselves singing in the language that they are studying.  The videos representing Chinese, French, German, Latin, Russian, and Spanish were screened at the event, and students and faculty were able to view the videos and vote online in person or remotely.

Dr. Holmes's book, Philosophy, Poetry, and Power in Aristophanes's Birds (Cambridge 2018), was favorably reviewed in the Classical Journal.

Dr. Christopher McDonough wrote the notes and introduction to Len Krisak's recent translation of Virgil's Aeneid.

Dr. Stephanie McCarter's translation of the poetry of Horace, Horace: Epodes, Odes, and Carmen Saeculare was published in July of 2020.

Dr. McDonough's documentary, Mine 21, about a Grundy County mine explosion in the 1980s was aired twice this month on East Tennessee PBS.

On Friday, November 1, two outstanding works will be honored with the 2019 Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media.

The 5th Annual International Karaoke Night took place on November 7, 2019 at the Tiger Bay Pub. There were songs in 8 different languages: Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, and Spanish.

University of Texas-Austin Professor Patricia Roberts-Miller presents "The Pleasures of Outrage: Why We Love Demagoguery."

Sewanee Classics Professor Chris McDonough has recently published two articles.