Deborah Beck
Deborah Beck has won various awards for both teaching and research, including the 2021 Award for Excellence in the Teaching of Classics at the College and University Level from the Society for Classical Studies and a prize for Excellence in Faculty Teaching from the Gamma Sigma chapter of the national Classics undergraduate honors society Eta Sigma Phi (2019) and two Plumer Visiting Research Fellowships at St Anne’s College, Oxford (2017 and 2019). Her main research interest is ancient Greek and Roman epic poetry, especially Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. She is the author of two books on Homeric epic, Homeric Conversation (Harvard, 2005) and Speech Presentation in Homeric Epic (UT Austin, 2012), which has an accompanying open-access database (https://homeric-speech-beck.la.utexas.edu/home), as well as many articles on ancient Greek and Roman epic poetry. Her current book project, The Stories of Epic Similes in Greek and Roman Epic, is under contract with Cambridge University Press. She also publishes regular opinion pieces on both current events and higher education. These essays have appeared in newspapers around Texas and in national publications, including “Psychology Today” and “The Hill.” In her spare time, she enjoys classical music concerts, baking pecan pie made from home-grown nuts, reading mystery novels, and long walks around Austin. "Musings in Greek Literature," the podcast series that came out of my PTF project, produced its fourth season in spring 2024. You can listen to it here.
Podcasting as Experiential Learning in Classics
Students in pre-modern disciplines face greater challenges in finding productive and engaging avenues for Experiential Learning than students in fields whose connections to current events are more self-evident. Podcasting offers students of ancient Greece and Rome a way to connect with people outside their classrooms, both other students and interested members of the general public. It also requires them to hone their oral presentation skills and to think about how to present the same idea to different audiences, both of which are fundamental to critical thinking.