Benjamin Eldon Stevens, Ph.D.

Many former students have praised your classes for their high level of engagement--even when delving into heavily ‘factual’ fields like Roman History. How do you organize your courses to foster such terrific engagement with the course material?

I’m just delighted if students feel they can be engaged! I think any potential engagement must start with the professor showing their own interest in the material--but also making sure to mark their interest as just one example of the endlessly many shapes such interest might take. Otherwise, there’s a doubled risk of flattening things out: if no passion for subject-matter is possible, or if only the professor’s particular scholarly approach seems permissible, then the whole enterprise can feel Sisyphean (an impossible uphill slope, whereas I’m much more interested in journeys below!). So while a given approach can be advanced (in level of detail, in theoretical framing, etc.), I think the general feeling needs to be elementary: each next topic is the most interesting topic there has ever been!

… But as for how I organize courses to accomplish that, that’s something I’m still working on! In a ‘fact-heavy’ field like Roman History (or ancient language, or whatever), for me it helps to frame the study like an essay, with a controversial or at least a controvertible main claim that the class can test out: in that framing, information has salience and can therefore becomes significant.

Your students praise you for drawing surprising connections between what might seem a traditional subject--classic studies-- and other, newer fields. How do you incorporate such interdisciplinarity into your teaching?

… honestly, by not being able not to! If I’ve reached a point where I have theoretical framing for this particular interdisciplinarity--’classical reception studies’--the crossover started as something I just couldn’t stop doing. My scholarly training is in (Ancient Mediterranean, especially Roman) history and (Latin among other Indo-European) linguistics, and from there I developed a topic for my first book exploring what language does in culture, in particular how people use language to try to say what goes unsaid (Silence in Catullus). Well, what had gone more or less unsaid for me was a childhood love of science fiction--and the sense that the genre was somehow deeply linked to antiquity. That feeling took one concrete form in college, when my fellow Classics major Brett M. Rogers and I, running a Greek and Latin dorm, hosted “Wacky Classics Movie Nights” including Transformers: The Movie, arguing enthusiastically and ludicrously that the Autobots have Latinate names, the Decepticons Greek, which makes Orson Welles’ Unicron the ‘barbarian hordes’ rampaging in from the north

… Utter gibberish! But it stuck with me, and years later I was able to step further in that direction thanks to intrigued department chairs at Hollins University, Bryn Mawr College, and of course here at Trinity. Ad astra per antigua!

Over the past several years, your students have collaborated on many creative projects, including board games, art pieces, blogs, and many more. What is the role of ‘creativity’ of learning in higher education?

I’ve been endlessly inspired by what students create. I’ve been fortunate to have focused opportunities to work with students in those connections--things like Mellon SURF and Murchison fellowships--but in general, I think that ‘creativity’ is so central to ‘academic’ work that the two shouldn’t really be distinguished. There are complex histories as to why they’re kept separate, but I think it’s fair to say that it has more to do with hierarchical social structures seeking to replicate themselves, and to restrict access to resources, than with meaningful distinctions between types of creation. For of course academic work is also ‘creative,’ and meaningful creation must be in context: think of improvisation in music, a capacity that’s as far as possible from ‘just noodling around.’

So in my courses, once we’ve reached a certain threshold of mastery of material, projects naturally become more open in form: otherwise, I risk merely replicating the structure of a given discipline, or as in (1) above, imposing my own aesthetic on others’ work. I note with amused sympathy that open-format assignments are often disorienting for students, much of whose training is to await detailed expectations. But disorientation, ‘losing track of the rising sun,’ is a valuable starting-point for real learning! In Ancient Greek, it’s aporia, ‘not knowing which way to go’--and therefore standing a real chance of forging a new path.

Trinity has long stressed the synergies between teaching and research, and you have been particularly successful in creating a ‘feedback loop’ between your courses and your publishing. What are some strategies that you’ve found most effective for keeping your research and your teaching in sync?

My approach here is pretty straightforward: in most of my courses, about 25% of the material is directly related to my research, whether that’s current or recently completed; partly that’s out of the convenience of being able to assign scholarship of mine, which the students can then argue with as they develop their own ideas. A bit less frequently, I assign materials that I’m only projecting working on. Quite often too, material that students have brought to courses, including in the open-format assignments I mentioned in (3) above, have played a role in publications. So there really is a ‘feedback loop’ at work: in ancient science-fictional words, a ‘cybernetic’ system, or perhaps more accurately in modern speculative-fictional terms, a ‘forking path,’ as the possibilities for interconnections ramify to infinity … And that’s just it: if higher education is to instill a practice of ‘lifelong learning,’ that depends so much on understanding that professors are students, only farther along. Many of us became professors because we simply couldn’t stop wanting to find out more!