Classics Faculty
There are three faculty within the Classics Section of the Department of Foreign Languages & Literatures. Contributing faculty from other departments promote study of Classics on campus by offering courses on the ancient world in their own disciplines.
Classics Section
Mont Allen is an art historian & archaeologist of the ancient Mediterranean world (with a joint appointment in SIU's Department of Art and Design). His research interests include Greek and Roman funerary sculpture, ancient sculptural tools and techniques, Greek mythology, Roman painting, Late Antique religions, intellectual history, and urban geography. He is a specialist above all in ancient Roman sarcophagi: those elaborate stone coffins, often lavishly carved with stories from Greek mythology, that rich Romans commissioned to receive their corpses and accompany them into eternity.
His academic research and other work, including a blog on Roman sarcophagi, strives to introduce these beautiful, astonishing, and profoundly strange relics of antiquity's most important civilization to a modern audience.
For Mont's full profile please see his website.
Dr. Freeman specializes in the religious and cultural history of the late antique Mediterranean in Greek-, Syriac-, Latin-, and Coptic-speaking contexts (joint appointment in History). In particular, she focuses on ancient Christianity from the first through seventh centuries. Her interests include ritual and practice, the cult of martyrs and their relics, homiletics and panegyric, ancient rhetoric, and the senses and emotion in religious experience. Her current book project focuses on speeches of praise for Christian martyrs preached by clergy on the martyrs' feast days throughout the Mediterranean and Near East both as a means of cultivating social consensus in Christian communities and as diverse local manifestations of piety toward the martyrs. For Dr. Freeman's CV, see here.
Dr. J's primary research interest is Socratic literature, particularly works on Socrates by Xenophon. Xenophon, a contemporary of Plato who, like Plato, knew Socrates during his youth, wrote not only about Socrates but about the history of his times, the Persian empire, horses, economics, and hunting. He thus brought a broader and more practical approach to writing about Socrates than the more philosophically minded Plato. Dr. J's teaching interests include Greek and Latin language, Greek Civilization, and historical role-playing pedagogy. For more on Dr. J's teaching & research, and some wise advice should you take the hydrofoil to Santorini, check out his homepage.
Contributing faculty
Gretchen Dabbs (Anthropology)
Robert Hahn (Philosophy)