Classics, Ancient History, Linguistics, Academia and more
It's the end of the last week of term here in Exeter, and we've had a whole host of fun end-of-term things: the Classics Christmas Ball run by the Classics Society, a staff Christmas party, and a Christmas quiz with my third-year linguists (with impressive Greek-themed baking, pictured below - many thanks to Abi!). I've... Continue Reading →
It's (just about) getting to the time of year when people are having job interviews for next academic year. I've had a few interviews over the past few years, some successful and some not, but I always found the best resources for interview preparation online. The most important thing (I think) is planning answers to... Continue Reading →
My review of Harry Potter and the Classical World by Richard A. Spencer is now online at the Classics for All online reading room. As you can tell from the review, I enjoyed this book great deal! It goes into an incredible amount of detail about the Classical allusions in the Harry Potter series - perhaps... Continue Reading →
Language is a problem for sci-fi. In any story involving contact with alien peoples or human civilisations from the distant future, there has to be a mechanism for understanding what everyone else is talking about, or most plots will never get off the ground. In Star Trek, you have the linguist Uhura, who has already presumably put... Continue Reading →
One of my favourite things about the Roman death course I'm teaching this year is that every week teaches me something I never knew before. A few weeks ago, while I was translating some epitaphs to use in a lecture, a particular word caught my eye. The inscription ran: Rottio hic sit[us es]t iuve/nili robore... Continue Reading →
I didn't mean to make this a week of "How-To" blog posts, but somehow it has become one! Soon after I published my post "How I Write a Lecture", Ellie Mackin posted my contribution to her "How I Plan" series of interviews. If you want to know how I plan my research, you can read... Continue Reading →
This term has involved a lot of lecture writing for me. Planning, writing and teaching two brand-new courses at the same time has been brilliant fun so far, but also lots of work. Talking to colleagues, I've realised that not all of us take the same approach to writing new courses - and talking to... Continue Reading →
As some of you know, I've been in the chorus of the Cambridge Greek Play a couple of times - in Agamemnon in 2010 and in Prometheus/Frogs 2013. I've also written before about putting together the Cambridge Greek Play online archive, which I did in the summer of 2015. This year, I had the unique experience of being... Continue Reading →
I'm excited to say that my article "The sociolinguistics of gender, social status and masculinity in Aristophanes" has now been published online in the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics. The research in this article ultimately goes all the way back to my undergraduate thesis, though my conclusions have changed many times since then. But I kept coming... Continue Reading →
It's October, and the internet is full of tips for people embarking on their PhDs. I've seen some excellent advice over the last few days, and I wanted to gather some of this wisdom here. Everyone's PhD experiences and circumstances are different, but hearing from those who have been through the same process before is... Continue Reading →
Katherine McDonald 