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COL & CLASSICS ALUMNI PANEL 

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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

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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