The Sunoikisis Course on Leadership in the Ancient World Goes LIVE!
Here’s to the collaborators, the artists, and the idealists: Sunoikisis, a national consortium of Classics programs, is excited to announce that the online platform for its Fall 2016 course on leadership in the ancient world is now live and open to the public. This course is designed to serve as introduction to the ancient Mediterranean world in the tradition of courses on vocabulary building through Greek and Latin, mythology, and gender and sexuality.
The course’s particular goal is to inspire new visions of leadership through an in-depth study of leadership in classical antiquity. Drawing on literature, history, archaeology, and material culture, the fifteen modules explore big questions about crises of leadership, leaders and followers, gender and leadership, rhetoric and self-presentation, and more.
Designed with a general audience in mind, each course module includes a broad introduction to its topic; ancient readings and images accompanied by guiding questions and expert commentary; seven hours of independent study activity; suggested group activities; ‘deeper cuts’ into ancient readings and contemporary scholarship; as well as reflection prompts designed to bridge the study of ancient leadership with one’s experience of leadership today. The course includes material from Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Persian antiquity, arranged to maximize thought-provoking connections between modules. Further guidance on how to navigate the site may be found here.
The innovative syllabus has resulted from months of collaboration among Classicists at over a dozen different institutions, led by Joel Christensen (Brandeis University), John Esposito (UNC-Chapel Hill), Mallory Monaco Caterine (Tulane University), and Norman Sandridge (Howard University). For more on all who contributed to this project see our credits page. We wish to thank especially the team at the University of Southern California that created and maintains the scalar platform that the course runs on.
This fall, the ancient leadership course will be taught concurrently, yet independently, at Howard University, Brandeis University, Tulane University, University of Texas-San Antonio, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Emory University, and the University of Findlay. Weekly common sessions, hosted via Google Hangouts, will be free and public to all. All registered students will be able to discuss ancient leadership among themselves and with advanced researchers on ancient leadership.
Follow the Sunoikisis Ancient Leadership course on Twitter @Duces_Antiqui and like it on Facebook @sunoikisisancientleadership.
If you are willing to travel around the world to meet a teacher, one will appear next door — Zen saying.
Want to study ancient leadership online with a professional tutor???
We happily invite participation in this course from anyone interested in the topic of leadership, and we hope to enrich the conversation of the course with as many and as diverse voices as possible. Participants who are not affiliated with one of the institutions offering the course for credit can join the ancient leadership community via a professional tutor, who will enable you to engage with the course in the following ways:
- weekly common sessions
- virtual “office hours” with multiple instructors
- 24 hour chat using themed channels on Slack.com
- ongoing anonymous surveys
- weekly one-hour online tutorials in cohorts of five participants
Follow this link to register!
