The Outreach Program has always been invested in engaging new audiences and bringing them closer to what we love most: Classics. This is our mission, but we need to step out of our comfort zone, if we want to offer to the public an unforgettable experience. The pandemic may have forced us behind a screen, but did not stop us from envisioning the future. And the future is multimedia and it happens..now!
We came together with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and Cincinnati Opera for a new, exciting project: offering talks with musical content. Everyone loves music and its power to sweep us away to a different world: why not combine it with our talks? 
CSO and Cincinnati Opera agreed on offering high quality performances, recorded specifically on request by their talented and passionate artists. Outreach talks will start regularly and end with a beautiful surprise: a captivating musical selection, created from partner organizations, just for our audiences! Technology offers so many avenues that we can tailor each one to the specific public we want to engage: seniors will listen to the recordings made at Cincinnati Music Hall on the spot, whereas students can enjoy them anytime through their Spotify accounts or on their Youtube. If you believe this is too good to be true, think again: on February 11th, a small group of artists from the CSO and the Cincinnati Opera recorded the first small program we will debut in March at OLLI. The selection includes a versatile repertoire: two joyous pieces by Debussy (Syrinx and Prélude à l’apres-midi d’un faune) and a haunting aria by Purcell (“When I am laid in Earth”), a perfect match to conclude our talk on Aspasia and evoke her tormented life in Classical Athens.
This is only the beginning: Stay tuned!

Valia Tsikritea, a Ph.D. candidate in the UC Department of Classics, has received the Archaeological Institute of America’s Harriet and Leon Pomerance Fellowship for the AY 2021-2022. The award supports her dissertation project, entitled "An Archaeology of Cult at Juktas, Crete: Early Iron Age Pottery and Figurines from the 'Tomb of Zeus,'" which is a study of the peak sanctuary on Mt. Juktas in the 12th-7th centuries BCE. Juktas, identified with the mythical locality of the burial place of Zeus in later tradition, was the peak sanctuary of the palace of Knossos in the Minoan period. While most scholarly interest has been directed to the Minoan period of the sanctuary, Tsikritea's dissertation examines changes in cult practices on the site across the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age, revisiting questions on the character of Cretan religion in this period and situating developments at the sanctuary within their Cretan and Aegean sociopolitical context. The peak sanctuary of Juktas presents an ideal case study because, despite the decline of many peak sanctuaries in the period, it continued to be frequented without any interruption. She will investigate cult practices at the site through the study of  unpublished assemblages of pottery and ceramic figurines, found in systematic excavations conducted in the 1970s and 1980s. During the Fall semester, she will use the award to fund her stay at Heraklion, where she will examine artifacts held in the storerooms of the Archaeological Museum of Heraklion, as well as at the Stratigraphical Museum of the BSA Research Center at Knossos.

Tsikritea is the fourth UC Classics graduate student in the last years to win this award.

Dr. Barbara Burrell is offering an intimate look at artifacts of Ancient Greece through her in-person and online hybrid course. The archaeologist hosts students in a classroom only one day a week to have hands-on experience with UC's precious artifacts. The COVID-19 pandemic initially put a damper on in-person classes at UC. However, Dr. Burrell redesigned her archaeology course with the assistance of an Instructional Innovation Advisory Council award from the College of Arts and Sciences.

Access to such archaeological artifacts is unprecedented even without a global pandemic.

“Ordinarily, you’d have to volunteer at a museum to handle these artifacts. It’s a rare opportunity,” Dr. Burrell said. UC students are among very few who get to experience history so intimately. 

PhD candidate Alice Crowe will be spending Fall 2020 at the British School at Athens' Knossos Research Center where she will conduct analysis on pottery sherds from around the settlement. By using evidence from multiple excavations and surveys, Crowe is building up to an examination of intra-site variances. She cites the impressive history of projects conducted at Knossos as the main reason such a large-scale project is possible. Crowe hopes to use her findings to determine the trajectory of the town over the course of the LM II-III period: did its extent contract and/or shift? If so, was the change gradual or punctuated, site-wide or localized? Crowe's dissertation is titled "Beyond the Walls of the Labyrinth: A Site-wide Perspective on Final Palatial and Postpalatial Knossos."

Mark your calendars and register now!

https://www.ascsa.edu.gr/events/details/sixty-years-exploring-prehistoric-kea

In early October UC Classics and the College-Conservatory of Music co-sponsored a Zoom presentation of "Antigone in Ferguson," a production by the acclaimed Theater of War. The production featured readings from Sophopcles' "Antigone" followed by a public forum which focused on relevance to today's issues of social justice. The production also featured performances by a choir composed on civic leaders from Ferguson, Missouri. The Theater of War aims to create discourse and healing regarding the death of Black Americans at the hands of the police. Dr. Brant Russell of CCM and Dr. Caitlin Hines of the Classics Department worked with Harvard, Georgetown, and Emory Universities to bring this production to students.