Scott Fergusson Masterclass:  A College Education, Lifelong Fascinations, and the Creative Process

by

On April 11, the College of Letters and the College of Film and the Moving Image co-sponsored a Masterclass with 5-time Emmy winner, television and film producer Scott Ferguson. Ferguson has been the executive producer of shows and films including, but not limited to: Succession (2019-2023), The Night Of (2016), Heavy (1995), and Brokeback Mountain (2005). The event was held in the COL Library, with nearly 30 attendees crowding the seating area. From the hand-raises Ferguson prompted at the beginning of the talk, nearly half attendees were COL majors, with the other half being Film studies majors. Professor of the Practice in Letters Charles Barber and Ferguson sat in armchairs towards the front of the library, with a projector screen behind them, which would screen scenes from Heavy and Succession. 

“Well, first, I’m a huge believer in a university education, and I have two degrees from different schools, and both changed my life in a very good way.”

At Columbia University’s Film MFA program, Ferguson said he met remarkable people like James Mangold, Lisa Cholodenko, whom he had the chance to work with later.

Ferguson grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, where finding an “in” to the film business was difficult, and he had no family or industry connections as such. After his undergraduate years at Cornell University, he moved back to Pittsburgh and worked at a department store. 

“And then I finally said, I have to do what I can to get as close as I can.” 

Among other projects like making silent films, Ferguson officially entered the film industry at a television station in Pittsburgh, where he worked his way up. 

“I grew up in Pittsburgh, where there was no such thing as a film business. But you know, for me, going to school kind of changed [my] worldview and my ambition to try something, that I never would have conceived of, had I not gone there.” 

Among the many questions students asked, one was on the value of attending film school beyond making connections.

“I did spend, like, a handful of years [working] between undergrad and grad, and I made the observation [in] Cornell [as an undergraduate myself], which  had a MFA actor program, and the young actors who had just finished undergrad went straight into grad school, versus the ones who spent a handful of years outside– I was much more impressed with people who had some real life experience.” Fergusson responded.

“You may or may not need it,” he said. “A couple of the most accomplished people I’ve worked with in the industry never went to college, David Mamet and Scott Rudin, and they didn’t need college to make it at the highest level.”

Ferguson spoke about a niche topic he discovered in college, while taking a Roman History class for major requirements. It turned into a lifelong fascination, which also helped him connect with people in the industry.

“When it was time to meet on Succession, I had lunch with Jesse Armstrong. And he and I were talking, but we barely talked about the show. I saw the pilot and read the pilot draft. They had shot a season before me. We ended up talking about Julio-Claudian emperors almost the whole time. And that stuff is useful. It’ll come in handy, all that weird knowledge.”

In the late 50s, and 60s, Ferguson said, there was the emergence of the auteur theory, which lionized the role of the director as the chief author of a given production. Now, he feels, the emphasis is on writers and showrunners. At the same time, Ferguson related, that doesn’t mean that people in the industry configure all creative decisions unilaterally. He emphasized still, the value of collaborative thinking and pitching, even if decision making in these kinds of industries is centralized. 

“And so being [collaborative process] where you know you’re feeding off of each other is kind of what I’m talking about. There’s this alchemy that what we achieve is bigger than the sum of its parts; but also, the sum of its parts is kind of this fun life that I’ve enjoyed.”

Written by Janhavi Munde, COL Class of 2027

COL & CLASSICS ALUMNI PANEL 

by

Communications Lead, Cybercrime Enforcement Attorney, Registrar. What do these professions have in common? 

On 26 March, COL alumni Heather Teixeira ‘08, Chris Kaltsas ‘11, and Emma Graham ‘19 returned as panelists to talk–among other things–about how their education informed their work, at the Gordon Career Center (GCC). The talk was co-sponsored by the Classical Studies Department and the GCC, with three of four panelists also having majored in the COL. The panelists’ experiences exemplified how a COL education doesn’t lead into a single-stream career path, but truly a ‘gateway to everything’. 

Heather Teixeira ‘08 leads communications on HIV and tuberculosis vaccine development for the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI). She spoke about how studying classics and history informed what she would want to do. On a practical level, she is often confronted with scientific language past her level, at work. She carries with her skills she learned in her undergraduate years: looking at dense language, unfamiliar terms, and finding what’s really important to communicate to a wider audience.

“I learned to not feel intimidated by something that isn’t immediately intelligible, and to work it through.” 

Check out heather’s thesis, published in 2008: Poetry, Politics, Persuasion: The Rhetoric of Demosthenes and George W. Bush

Chris Kaltsas ‘11 is an attorney practicing at Davis Wright Tremaine LLP (DWT) in San Francisco, California. Prior to Chris’s practice at DWT on cybercrime enforcement and litigation, he served as an attorney at the U.S Department of Justice for 7 years. He remarked that when you think of working for the federal government, you don’t immediately think of a classical background. But in his role as crime coordinator, his  interest in artefacts of any variety allowed him to work on interesting cases, including in art crime.

CHECK OUT CHRIS’ THESIS, PUBLISHED IN 2011: Spartacus Mythistoricus: Winning Spartacus into the Mythical

Emma Graham ‘19 is Registrar at David Zwirner Gallery, a global contemporary art gallery. Emma focuses on managing the art inventory of the gallery – including coordinating shipments of artwork, condition checking artwork, and installing large scale exhibitions. She shared that her work requires thinking through puzzles and how different moving parts can fit into a space, which doesn’t necessarily seem like it connects to her educational background. But when she thinks about what the process of learning an ancient language or translation was like at university, it involved the same process of logistically thinking through a problem, as it does at her work. She further related how she found community in her industry with people who have studied classics, history, and literature. 

“My first boss took a chance on me, because we shared that (studied) past together.”

CHECK OUT  EMMA’S THESIS, PUBLISHED IN 2019: Work at the Ancient Roman Villa: Representations of the Self, the Patron, and Productivity Outside of the City

Written by Janhavi Munde, COL Class of 2027

Viewing Medieval Manuscripts in Olin’s SCA

by

Do you know the difference between a manuscript and a facsimile? 

COL Sophomores do. On February 19th, COL Sophomores visited Olin’s Special Collections and Archives to view medieval manuscripts with Head of Special Collections, Tess Goodman. Students learned about manuscript-making, historical factors affecting use of parchment and paper, arrival of the printing press, and the significance of decorations, ink colours, and manuscript layout – all of which related to the texts studied in the Medieval Colloquium under Professor Hadel Jarada and Professor Tushar Irani.

By understanding the way manuscripts are made, students gained insight into multiple examples of how–when you know what to look for– centuries-old manuscripts can reveal evidence of dynamic multi-cultural inter-regional, cross-religious exchanges. Focussing only on the evidence of the ‘Abbasid era texts, students saw evidence of the Graeco-Arabic translation movement which brought East-Roman study of Aristotelian logic and philosophy, Galenic medical science, Ptolemaic geometry and astronomy, and more into the Arabic cultural sphere (and then back again in exchange with Greek scientists!).

Similarly, a text read for the Colloquium as an example of Persianate literature: ibn Al-Muqaffas’s ‘Kalilah and Dimnah’, was translated into Arabic for the ‘Abbasid caliphs as a part of a large scale turn towards Persian cultural heritage and away from the Roman.  This historical context explains why the frame narrative of ‘Kalilah and Dimnah’ endows translators Barzawayh and Buzurgmihr with acknowledgement and praise for their achievement. This cultural, political movement brought knowledge and culture from regions as distant from Baghdad as India and China, allowing us to expand our concept of the COL’s cultural focus. 

Students considered a range of texts from 12th century Armenian manuscripts, to 18th century editions of the Bible and the Qur’an. With quills, parchment, and paper as witness, students did an oral-drawing of manuscripts. In this exercise, one student described the manuscript in front of them, to their partner who then drew the described text to the best of their ability. This exercise instilled focus onto structural details of manuscripts: margins, line spacing, embossment, font style, column divisions– which, as Professor Jarada and Professor Irani explained, were all deliberate authorial choices that communicated information about style, genre, and textual authority. 

All that said, the bell’s just rung and class is out!

By Janhavi Munde, COL Class of 2027

Recent Faculty Publications

by

Check out some of our faculty’s recent publications! Professors Daniel Smyth, Ulrich Plass, Gabrielle Ponce-Hegenauer, and Charles Barber have all worked on books that were published within the past year (or so)!

Applications Now Being Accepted!

by

The Khachig Tölölyan Fund supports a monetary prize for second-semester juniors to be used to buy the successful applicant some free time in the summer before senior year to start research on Honors theses on particular topics more fully described here: https://www.wesleyan.edu/col/for_majors/grants_prizes.html

Applications are due by 5:00 pm on Friday, April 7, 2023, and consists of:

  1. A proposal for or description of a senior thesis, 1,000-1,500 words in length.
  2. An informal academic transcript.
  3. Two letters of recommendation from Wesleyan faculty, one of whom must be the probable supervisor of the Honors thesis. If the supervisor has not yet been determined, two letters from instructors familiar with the student’s work in fields relevant to the project will suffice.

A form for uploading your documents is available on the COL web page (listed above).

If you have any questions, please email ctappe@wesleyan.edu.