Hello everyone.
My name's Helen Lovatt,
and I'm Professor of Classics at the University of Nottingham.
I'm going to tell you a little bit about
my favourite module in the Department.
My favourite module is 'Communicating the Past',
which is a module in which students respond to archaeology,
classical civilization,
or its reception in a non-essay format.
And they use that to communicate about their chosen format and
topic to really deepen
understanding of whatever it is they are discussing.
And in the last year when I've been teaching it,
we've had some amazing projects
and this is why it's my favourite module.
Because basically the students do really,
really fascinating, interesting and exciting things.
And they are different every year.
And this year we had a virtual exhibition about the River Styx,
which used really amazing art and actually did
a three-dimensional sort of virtual walk-through exhibition.
We had an awesome video essay
about the reception of classics in K Pop.
I learned so much from that.
We had a range of a streetwear which was
showcasing the monuments of
Palmyra and thinking about their recent destruction.
That was really fascinating.
We had a recruitment brochure for a cult of Aphrodite,
which was an amazing bit magazine design as
well as really interesting thinking about ancient religion,
how that works, and how it could function in a modern context.
But the one I'm going to tell you more about today is
a virtual online exhibition about the manuscripts of Virgil.
So this is a project by
Emily Williams about the Aeneid and its manuscripts.
What she did was to make
a website which was an online exhibition
about the history of
how the major epic poem of the Roman race,
The Aeneid, came down to us by basically people
copying out the text on manuscripts.
And what she did was to design
an entire exhibition with a section for each book of the
Aeneid and you can see on
the exhibition page what she was doing
thematically with different books and how she was using
different manuscripts to illustrate it and explain.
She also had a glossary and
some activities for school students to do.
It was a really impressive project for a number of reasons.
So she'd done a lot of research
into the manuscript traditions of
Virgil's Aeneid and learned all
about all these different manuscripts.
She had also really communicated a lot of information about
quite difficult intellectual material in
a really thoughtful way that also made it attractive and
accessible to potential viewers with
a range of different audiences.
So she really thought about how different people
would access it and why.
And she'd done an amazing level of skills acquisition.
She taught herself quite a bit of Latin,
and she'd also learned all
about web design and exhibition design.
So it was really a very impressive project.
And she'd also written a great deal of very carefully
thought out text that was explaining the story of the Aeneid,
but also how that story was passed down to us.
So it was really the centre of what classics and
the classical tradition is about and
the whole point of Communicating the Past.
So she looked at it book by book and
she explored different themes relating to each book as well.
And she used the manuscripts to
illustrate and make the exhibition attractive.
So it was a really great project and really interesting work.
And that's why I really enjoy this module,
partly because it gives you skills
that help you in future careers.
And also because students can do
so many different things with it and can really learn about
the fascinating parts of Archaeology and Classics that they
wouldn't necessarily have a chance to
work on elsewhere in their course.
So thank you very much for listening,
and I hope you've enjoyed hearing about this module in
the Department of Classics and Archaeology at Nottingham
and I very much hope that you might
want to come and study with us in the future.
Bye.