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Emily Katz Anhalt

Hyman H. Kleinman Fellowship in the Humanities

AB, Dartmouth College. PhD, Yale University. Primary interests are Greek epic and lyric poetry, Greek historiography, Greek tragedy, and Greek and Roman sexuality. Publications include Solon the Singer: Politics and Poetics (Lanham, MD, 1993), as well as several articles on the poetics of metaphor in Homer and on narrative techniques in Herodotus. SLC, 2004–

Undergraduate disciplines: Classics, Ancient Greek, Latin

Courses taught in Ancient Greek

Courses taught in Latin

Connect with Emily Katz Anhalt

Emily Katz Anhalt

Emily Katz Anhalt

What do you love about teaching at Sarah Lawrence?
Education here is a collaborative process. Students have to find out what they are excited about. When my students are devising their conference projects, I tell them the topic they choose should be the thing that gets them out of bed in the morning.

And they are very creative. I had one student who did a conference project looking at gender and sexuality in fifth-century Greek vase painting and comparing that to modern clothing advertisements. Another student examined the wartime rhetoric recorded by Thucydides, the fifth-century historian, and compared these speeches to the wartime speeches of Presidents Lincoln, Roosevelt, and George W. Bush. I love it when students can take lessons from the ancient world and translate them for modern times.

How do you connect with students and make sure they are engaged in the material you teach?
My goals are to help students discover how they love to use their minds and to give them the tools to think with. I think college students are at a stage in their lives when they are drawn to the big questions; they really want to understand what it means to be a human being.

I try to draw that curiosity out by being inventive in my classes. We do some role-playing, which my students love. We usually have a "conversation in the underworld," where students take on the roles of various fictional characters or historical/mythical figures, and discuss the implications of what they’ve read—for then and for now. I’ve had classes do a pre-war Congress where we tried to avert the Peloponnesian War. We also put Cicero on trial for his execution of the Catilinarian conspirators. I think students like that I try to get them to engage with the material and engage with each other and they are usually very receptive to that.