Program

All of the events scheduled for this year's CANE Summer Institute (Freedom and Its Discontents) took place as planned Our enrollments were exactly the same (71) as last year. As always, the CANE Summer Institute drew on a faculty from a number of different high schools, liberal arts colleges and universities: This year, we had faculty from a total 13 different schools and universities. Most of the faculty lived in the same dormitory as the participants, shared meals with them and attended and responded to one another’s lectures.

As always, we had help from humanists who informed us about the ancient world; but also from humanists who taught us the influence of the classical tradition on later periods. Scholars and performers who helped us with the latter goal included Carl B. Estabrook, who spoke about the British Atlantic slave trade of the 18th and early 19th centuries; Victor Swenson, who taught a course about freedom in 20th and 21st century Turkey; Curator Bonnie MacAdam of the Hood Museum of Art, who talked about the 19th century American sculptor Hiram Powers’ statue, The Greek Slave; and actor Marcia Estabrook, who performed a one-woman show in which she took on the role of Ellen Craft, an African-American slave who escaped from the American south by dressing as a white man and pretending that her husband was her slave. This year, as last, we also scheduled two sessions at the Hood Museum of Art: Bill Mierse of the University of Vermont led two very well received15-person workshops on the museum’s ancient coin collection.

One extremely successful and experimental addition of this year's curriculum was the course taught by Neel Smith and Gabe Weaver called "Preparing Free Editions of Classics Texts". Smith and Weaver's students marked up biographies of Cornelius Nepos in TEI-XML format, using an edition of the ancient author’s biographies that was out of copyright. These texts will now be put online on several servers. Because of the markup, the texts can be turned into .pdf files and printed out for classroom use; or found online and searched in any number of different ways--for example, for the different instances of a particular Latin word in all of the posted biographies. One can also search these texts for geographic entities (e.g. rivers), proper names, foreign (=non-Latin, usually Greek) terms and the like. It is my hope, and the hope of the instructors who taught the course, that this project will only grow--that more and more classicists will contribute texts of their choice to a growing corpus of ancient texts formatted in TEI-XML that will remain permanently available to all; and that this corpus will be widely used in classroom contexts. Click here to see this project on line.

Logistics

Our greatest logistical problem this was that Dartmouth assigned us lecture halls on Thursday, July 6th, and classrooms on Friday, July 7th. Because the Institute began on July 10th, this made some forms of publicity very difficult. The local paper, The Valley News, is happy to advertise our public lectures, but requires four business days' notice. Since our lecture rooms were only assigned two business days before the start of the Institute, we were unable to get the Institute’s earliest lectures onto the Valley News calendar. We were able to advertise the events of the second half of the week. In addition, the Erin Bennett, our administrative assistant, had a poster designed and ready to go, but did not get the information on classrooms in time to get the poster printed out in full color. Instead, she had to print out a small (8 1/2 X11) black-and-white version of the lecture schedule for posting, and for passing out to members of the public who showed up to the early lectures. These problems may explain why we had fewer members of the public at our open lectures (6-20 people per lecture instead of last year’s 10-30).

Erin Bennett, our assistant, is going to talk with the office that assigns rooms to make sure this doesn’t happen again next year; and Ms. Sadhana Hall (of the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College) has offered to help us with next year, by leaning on the right people to get us our rooms earlier.

Tom Martin (College of the Holy Cross), was interviewed about his opening lecture, “From Iraq to Greece: Is Freedom Natural or Not?”, by WNTK radio station on Friday July 7th, at which time the location and date of his lecture were announced.

Plans for CANE Summer Institute 2007

2007 will be the 25th anniversary of the CANE Summer Institute, and we would like it to be a memorable occasion. Our theme is the influence of Greece and Rome on later periods. Suggestions for courses and lectures have included Ovid’s reception in the Renaissance, the reception of Catullus in the Renaissance, the influence of Aristotle on Thomas Aquinas, the influence of the classical tradition on early American thought and politics, Dryden’s Vergil, and Mussolini and the classics. We also hope to offer a particularly intensive Greek refresher course, which will involve 2 ½ hours of classroom time each day. This will be taught by Gil Rose, professor emeritus of Swarthmore College.

At this time (August 2006), we still trying to come up with a title for the 2007 Institute, more course and lecture topics, the names of faculty who might be interested in teaching at this Institute, and ideas about how to celebrate our 25th anniversary. Please send your ideas to eperry@holycross.edu, and thank you!