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Bronwen Hudson completed her master’s degree in general linguistics and comparative philology at Oxford University. She cites the background in Latin and English acquired at ����̽̽ as crucial to her success in graduate school. “I can’t express the gratitude I feel towards so many excellent folks at ����̽̽, but the people associated with the classics program will always have a particularly sacred place in my heart. Their teaching directly affected my postgraduate career.”

Hudson’s interest in the classical world is rooted in her childhood—she remembers her father reading The Iliad aloud to her and her siblings when she was about seven. Her family bounced around between Vermont and New Zealand during her childhood. “I was fortunate enough to be dragged around a bit—something one only appreciates later in life, I think. But I think of Vermont as home.”

The Hudsons returned to Vermont when Bronwen entered high school. She graduated a year early from Champlain Valley Union High School, equipped with a strong background in Latin. “I remember everything from ‘Caecilius est in via’ to the toga-bedecked students filing onto the bus for Latin Day (an annual event for high school Latin students in Vermont hosted by ����̽̽ classics).”

From her experience in high school, she was already familiar with the strength of the classics program at ����̽̽.

“My rather mild love for the Latin language, and Greek and Roman history, grew and blossomed fully,” she said. “I can say without hesitation that it was my classics professors who solidified my passion for the subject. They were and are unrivaled in their dedication not only to their subject but to the students themselves.”

Her academic experience at ����̽̽ was impacted by nearly every professor in the program. She cites John Franklin as a particularly influential mentor. Mark Usher served on her senior thesis panel, Brian Walsh arranged for her to take a Latin course while she did a hiking trip in England, Jacques Bailly introduced her to linguistics, and she describes Angeline Chiu as “the most powerful positive force that could possibly exist” in the Honors College.

“Truly, I could write, play, and sing a complete musical theater piece to laud the entire classics program staff at ����̽̽,” she said.

Hudson also appreciated the awareness among faculty of the reputation of classical writers as a misogynistic lot.

“Classics has the bleak association with white men learning from other, older white men, for the sake of upholding outdated models of education and societal structure. It’s a very worthwhile question to ask: Where are the people of color, and where are the women, in the classics?”

Happily, she found that it wasn’t a taboo topic at ����̽̽. She saw the educational environment was not about perpetuating damaging stereotypes; “it was about studying, discussing, questioning, and unpacking myriad topics that appear in ancient history—from warfare to sexuality, and from prepositional phrases to gender roles.”

But Hudson sees the classics not as an arcane study of ancient cultures that have no foothold in the present but as remarkably relevant to current affairs and her future. She sees the study of Latin as useful in any profession.

“Studying languages in general is incredibly valuable—to understand the grammar, the history of our words, and language structure allows us a clearer, broader view of communication. What could be more important in a world like ours?”

Peyton Ashley developed an early interest in classical civilization, in large part due to her mom who home-schooled her children before returning to the classroom as an English and history teacher.

“Each one of my siblings chose a time period in history that was most interesting to them, and my mom would read to us or give us books,” she said. “For me, it was ancient history, especially classical architecture and mythology.”

She learned about ����̽̽ from a friend who had visited the school and encouraged Ashley to apply.

“I declared classics as a major and then added anthropology later in sophomore year after taking a really interesting cultural anthropology class,” she said. “I was interested in how the two disciplines supported each other—I was committed to learning about other countries and exploring different definitions of civilization.”

Classics Professor Angeline Chiu was the advisor for her thesis “Daughters of Ares: Iconography of Amazons.” Her paper, which she presented at the 2019 Undergraduate Research Conference, compared the Amazon myth of Greek culture to contemporary American ideas, including the movie “Wonder Woman.”

While at ����̽̽ she also worked as a curatorial intern at the university’s Fleming Museum. She contributed research behind the revamped Africa and Ancient Egypt exhibition and for the installation of the “The Impossible Ideal: Victorian Fashion and Femininity” exhibition, which described how fashion both reflected and influenced women's behavior and beliefs in the Victorian era. These experiences have whetted her interest in combining her interests in art, education, and history to work as a museum curator.

Ashley was presented with the John H. Kent Memorial Award in classics, given each year to the top graduating senior in classics. She’s been accepted into the Teach for America program beginning in the fall of 2019. She can draw on her own experience as an educator—besides her curatorial work, she worked as a tutor in ����̽̽’s Undergraduate Writing Center for several years.

Ashley hasn’t been issued an assignment yet—she knows she’ll be teaching special education in Eastern North Carolina somewhere on the Kindergarten through grade 12 spectrum.

“I’m interested in sharing my passion for knowledge and learning,” she said. “Education is a real gift and I love the fact that I will be making a difference in the lives of underrepresented students.”

����̽̽ classics alumnus Michael Lippman received the Society for Classical Studies 2018 Award for excellence in teaching of the classics at the college level. He was a relative latecomer to the discipline having majored in English and history at Emory University. When he decided to concentrate on the classics, his former teacher Alden Smith advised him to go to ����̽̽. (Now a professor of classics at Baylor University, Smith had received his masters in classics at ����̽̽ and highly recommended the program).

Lippman realized he had some catching up to do in his Latin and Greek. After completing a year of intensive language studies, he arrived at ����̽̽ where he acquired a basic background in classical literature and history. “It was essentially a crash course in all the things I would have learned as an undergrad. It put me on a solid footing for launching my academic career.”

At ����̽̽, Lippman found a tightly-knit program centered on the individual student, and his two years in Burlington were a formative experience. He studied under several prominent professors at ����̽̽ including Robert H. Rodgers, Barbara Saylor Rodgers, Robin Schlunk, and Z. Philip Ambrose, who was his advisor on his thesis "Telemonian Ajax in the Iliad. He also remembers very influential marathon reading sessions with Professor of Classics Jacques Bailly, who had just begun his teaching at ����̽̽. “It was after the semester closed--we'd get our coffee in the morning and read The Illiad eight hours straight for about 3-4 days.” 

“����̽̽ was where I learned to make my way in the profession,” he recalls. “I was a graduate instructor, so I had the opportunity to teach there. The Rogers both supported my interest in teaching self-paced Latin and Greek language studies.”

Lippman began teaching at the University of Nebraska in 2013. As an Associate Professor of the Practice there, he has gained a reputation for a pied-piper-like ability to get students excited about the classics—since his arrival at Nebraska, his interest in classical studies has increased dramatically, and he is now teaching the first upper-level Greek classes offered at UNL in years.

The SCS award citation notes that Lippman’s “innovative pedagogy compels profound, personal, and critical engagement among his students.” He instituted and supported a thriving Classics Club on campus, which among other activities, stages an annual ancient battle reenactment attended by hundreds of students and faculty, and organized the “Homerathon,” a 24-hour reading marathon.

He has developed a reputation for finding innovative ways of revitalizing the classics in a higher education environment where the study of “ancient” language and culture is considered increasingly archaic.

Lippman believes the classics is more relevant than ever, a discipline that can build bridges between entrenched viewpoints.

“One of the nice things about the classics is that you can discuss very contentious issues on neutral grounds. We can talk about the role of the individual in 5th-century Athens in an abstract way. But students will draw inferences to how these discussions are still very applicable to our contemporary political environment.”

Peter Silverman is an entrepreneur focused on connecting students with volunteering, internships, and work opportunities. During his time at the ����̽̽, where he majored in business and minored in classics, he created two companies. His BeaconVT found over 500 students paid internships; his second company Majorwise has successfully managed over 15 high school internship programs across the country. Peter’s love of classics helped him along his journey in the world of entrepreneurship by learning the logic and structure of a rigorous language like Latin, and he continues to build and grow companies in the Boston area. He remembers several faculty members as inspirational mentors during his classics studies. "Professor Chiu was one of the reasons I came to ����̽̽ and the main inspiration around following what makes me passionate. I also liked studying Rhetoric in 253 with Robert Roger--I've used those skills a lot in my public speaking, business pitch competitions, and internal meetings." See this NBC , post-����̽̽.

Born and raised in Bretagne (Brittany), France, with diplomas in organic chemistry and engineering, Rozenn Bailleul-LeSuer lives in Chicago where she studies and teaches Egyptology. Her migration from rural France to metropolitan Chicago involved a crucial stopover at ����̽̽. After finishing her degrees in France, she moved to Burlington to join her fiancé, now husband, Bob LeSuer, who was starting a PhD program in chemistry with Dr. Bill Geiger. "While I had studied chemistry as an undergraduate, I did not see myself pursuing a career in that field. Ancient history had always fascinated me, in particular ancient Egypt." She decided to further explore this interest and begin a program in Egyptology. She contacted the ����̽̽ Program in Classics because it seemed like the logical starting place was studying ancient Greece and Rome. "I was immediately welcomed with open arms by the classics faculty. Dr. Barbara Saylor Rodgers suggested that I start learning ancient Greek since I had already studied Latin in High School. While quite challenging at first — I had not looked at my Latin grammar book for at least seven or eight years — I enjoyed reacquainting myself with these ancient languages."

During the two years she spent in the ����̽̽ Program in Classic as a graduate student, she had the opportunity to work with several of the faculty, in particular Mark Usher, who she described as "a wonderful mentor and fervent supporter of my work." Bailleul-LeSuer's next stop was the University of Texas at Austin, where she finished her MA thesis. After many years spent diving deep into the field of ancient Near Eastern studies, focusing on ancient Egypt, she completed her PhD dissertation “The Exploitation of Avian Resources in Ancient Egypt: A Socio-Economic Study.” She is now a research associate at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute.