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Please send news and photos to groton@stolaf.edu. Thanks!

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News from Catherine Kusske Warren '97 (Classics and Medieval Studies major):

Hello, fellow Classicists!

After getting an MA in China Studies at the University of Washington's Jackson School of International Studies, I got a job at GreaterGood.com, a network of websites raising money for charitable causes. I'm now a Senior Marketing Manager, working in project coordination, software testing, product launching, and on the company's Gifts That Give More program. Andrew Warren ('97) and I have two daughters: Vivian Joan, born April 2005, and Irina Elaine, born June 2007. I blog almost every day at http://catherinew.livejournal.com ; drop in and leave a comment sometime!

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Corinna (Cory) Knepper Troth '96 (Latin and Speech-Theatre major) and her family relax on an ancient wall in Herculaneum during a trip to Italy last summer (2007).

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Jill Schwendeman '84 (Classics and English major) has sent adorable photos of sons Søren and Skyler Heise Schwendeman dressed for a school presentation on gladiators, then playing the violin, still in costume. Meanwhile a lamb takes son Julian for a run.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jill, married to Tiger Heise, is now youth director at White Bear Unitarian Universalist Church in Mahtomedi.

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Welcome to Edmund MacLeod Keister, born on July 29, 2007, to Lane Keister '00 (Greek and piano performance major) and his wife Sarah; Edmund has two older siblings, Ila Lorraine and James Mark Calvin. Lane is the pastor of not one but two Reformed churches in Hague, North Dakota. To see a cute photo of Edmund as a newborn and to read a plethora of comments about him, go to Lane's blog: http://greenbaggins.wordpress.com/2007/07/25/edmund-macleod-keister/

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Visit from Gwen Compton-Engle '92 (Classics major), Tron Compton-Engle '92 (Ancient Studies major), and daughter Mia:


Congratulations to Gwen, who has received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor of Classics at John Carroll University! The whole family visited the St. Olaf Classics Department on August 6, 2007.

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Look who dropped by on June 1, 2007: Andrea Gatzke '05 (Classics and history major), now in graduate school at Penn State University (Classics and Ancient Mediterranean Studies)--and still smiling!  

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News from Christine DeLong '98 (Classics major):

After I graduated with my Classics major in 98, I loafed around Minneapolis for a year and was somehow accepted to Emory University School of Medicine (that one still puzzles me). It was a close one, but I graduated with my MD in 2003 and went on to complete an Internal Medicine Residency at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. I stayed on at UNM for a Chief Resident year as I couldn't resist the offer to hang around and become the Queen of resident scheduling. I arrived in Tucson about a month ago (June, 2007) to lovely 100F + weather to begin fellowship training in Cardiology.

As you can see, I'm on a clockwise tour of the US. Give me a few years and I'll either be in Seattle or perhaps Alaska; it's difficult even for me to predict where this doctoring business will take me. I haven't made it back to Italy or Greece since college, but am desperately trying to do so in the next year or so. No marriages or miraculous births to announce; at this point the career is quite enough, I suppose. "Quo Usque Tandem....": yes, I still recall some Cicero, and I believe it helped me gain entrance to Med School as I quoted that for the admissions committee when they asked me what I had learned as a Classics major.

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News from John Voelker '82 (Classics major, now Pastor of Trinity Lutheran Church in Thief River Falls, MN):

I finally finished and defended my dissertation on Marius Victorinus' Nicene-trinitarian theology and graduated last year (Ph.D. in Historical Theology, 2006) at Marquette University. There's a lot more work I plan on doing in Victorinus, as well as other Latin Nicenes such as Gregory of Elvira and Phobaedius of Agen (whose Anti-Arian, Nicene treatises have never been translated from the Latin).

I'm going back to Oxford for the third time next week. I gave papers on Victorinus there in '99 and '03, and now I'm giving a paper on Victorinus' theology of Filioque in his trinitarian treatises. (At my rooms at Christ Church I would always walk underneath the statue and inscription of Liddell every morning, making me think of St. Olaf Classics days...) The appearance of Filioque in the Neo-Nicene theology of the Latin West ca. 360 is something a lot of scholars are fascinated with; a good example of the treasures in Victorinus' post-conversion works.

After spending more than a decade now immersed in Victorinus' dense Latin, I have constantly reflected on the immensely useful Latin learned at St. Olaf. That latent but enduring influence was one of the things that made me want to go into Patristics when I had to choose and commit to an area of scholarship in theology.

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Photo of Sarah Bowen '96 (Greek and Ancient Studies major) and Terrina Anderson '96 (Greek and clarinet performance major), both now serving in the Army (taken at Fort MacPherson in Atlanta, GA, January, 2007):

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News from Kate Reilly '98 (Medieval Studies major):

I'm on the third job of my second career after graduating St. Olaf in 1998. I spent five years as a reporter in the Minneapolis suburbs following graduation. Now I have a Masters in Urban and Regional Planning from the Humphrey Institute at the University of Minnesota and I'm working as a transportation planner for a private planning & engineering consulting firm in Minneapolis. Oddly enough, being a medieval studies major prepared me for planning school! Having a knowledge of city morphology stemming from studies of medieval cities helped me while studing the history of planning. This particular career choice has taken me from working for the federal government in Washington, DC and Yuma, AZ and for the city of Minneapolis.

I live with my partner in Hopkins, which is the community I covered as a reporter, and I serve on the Park Board.

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News from Dorothy (Dot) Porter '98 (Medieval Studies major):

I'm still at the University of Kentucky in the position of Program Coordinator for the Collaboratory for Research in Computing for Humanities (RCH). After 2 1/2 years of working on projects to create electronic editions of damaged Old English manuscripts through the English department, the University shifted my position to the Department of Modern and Classical Languages. I'm now working for Prof. Ross Scaife, the founding editor of the Stoa Consortium (http://www.stoa.org/). We have several very interesting projects in the works (and several grant proposals pending), and we're both working hard to bring in new humanities computing projects, involving both on-campus and off-campus collaborators. The collaboratory and our projects are described on our website: http://www.rch.uky.edu/

Among my job responsibilities is representing RCH to the wider humanities computing community, and I've somehow managed to convince others that I'm a responsible adult. In just the past few months I've been elected to a two-year term on the technical council of the Text Encoding Initiative (http://www.tei-c.org/), elected to a seat on the executive board of the Digital Medievalist Community of Practice (http://www.digitalmedievalist.org/), nomiated as chair for the Medieval Academy of America (http://www.medievalacademy.org/) Council on Electronic Resources, and nominated for a seat on the council of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (http://www.ach.org/).

Oh, and I got engaged in September and will be married April 29! My fiance's name is Sergey Leontsev, he's a PhD candidate in physics at UK and is a native of Ukraine. That's us in the attached picture.

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News from Marquis Berrey '03 (Classics major):

June, 2005: Greetings, Oles--

After graduation I lived in Basel, Switzerland for a year, studying German and
classics. I found out I like Switzerland but not Swiss graduate school. Now I'm in Austin, studying at the University of Texas and slowly working my way through classics graduate school. At the moment I'm curious about Greco-Roman science and maintain a links page on ancient authors.

Austin's a great town but much hotter than Northfield. Still that's not a problem for me: where else do you find graduate students but in an air-conditioned library? https://webspace.utexas.edu/msb396/www/

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News from Stephanie Hill Simione '92 (Medieval Studies major):

May, 2005: Since graduating from St. Olaf, I worked for a year in the library at the correctional facility in Faribault (yes, medieval studies prepares you for a role as prison librarian). I left prison life to obtain a master's degree in English from the University of Minnesota. My focus of study was medieval and renaissance literature and I worked mainly on how Spenser uses Chaucerian language, themes and nuances in the Fairie Queene.

Now armed with two degrees in medieval literature, I worked for two years in a healthcare system doing marketing. For the past four years I've been managing a customer support center for software and found I really enjoy the geeky work of playing with software.

Along the way I married my Olaf sweetheart Anthony Simione '92, Theatre and Art History, and currently, I'm staying home with our two children, Zachary and Isabella.


Neither child can translate Latin or recite the Canterbury Tales, but you can admire their many talents at http://home.earthlink.net/~shsimione.

I haven't yet decided what type of job I'd like to do next with my degrees in old, dead white folks, but for now I'm enjoying a break from office work.

Email:shsimione@yahoo.com

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News from Esther Lee '03 (Ancient Studies major):

Dear fellow Oles! Though I started out as a biology major, my path took a turn when I went on the Classical Studies in Greece program with Prof. Groton in January 2001. I graduated majoring in biology, concentration on molecular biology, and ancient studies. I wanted to combine my two interests so went to Manchester, England for a MSc program in Biomolecular Archaeology.

After finishing the one-year program, I flew back to the US and now have just begun my second semester in a PhD program at SUNY, Binghamton for molecular anthropology. My field is studying the genetic data to infer population history in terms of migration, origins, etc. We can infer beyond the archaeological record of human or non-human populations. I'd be happy to answer any questions, about molecular anthropology, bio-archaeology or even living in England! (http://anthro.binghamton.edu; starejl@yahoo.com)

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A moving funeral for David Grose (St. Olaf '66, Classics major) took place in Boe Chapel on October 26, 2004. One of the world's leading authorities on ancient Roman glass, David had taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst: http://www.umass.edu/loop/people/articles/6780.php.

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News from Kristie Kiesel '01 (Classics major):

After three years of teaching English and giving tours of archaeological sites in Japan, Kristie is back in the States. She recently visited St. Olaf and supplied this photo of herself in Nagasaki, being taught how to scuba dive by her instructor, Mr. Tsuruta (she received her scuba certification in July, 2004):


Kristie has been studying the history of Christianity in Japan and may pursue a graduate degree in that area.

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News from Jon Bruss '89 (Classics major):

After a two-year term appointment as Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at St. Olaf, Jon has accepted a tenure-track position in the Department of Classical Languages at the University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. While the move there will prompt some interesting paradigm shifts for him, his wife Kris, and daughter Ingrid (the Civil War is no longer the war against slavery but the war of Northern aggression), they are excited about the new position and life in Sewanee.

The Department of Classical Languages at Sewanee is healthy and thriving, staffed by solid and collegial classicists, and populated by students who are bright, interested, and committed. It has historically drawn more students to Latin than Greek and continues to prepare a substantial portion of its graduates to teach Latin in the schools. One of the challenges for Bruss in the new position will be to advance the cause of Greek amongst the students.

Set on a mountain top 1,900 feet above sea level in southern Tennessee, the University of the South, owned by 29 Anglican dioceses, has about 1,500 students. Its buildings are in the collegiate gothic style, and one way to explain the visual impact of the campus is to say that it looks like an Oxbridge college set down in a small mountain village. In light of its student body, curriculum, colleagues and architecture, Bruss has been recently overheard remarking to his Northern friends that Sewanee might be envisioned as the St. Olaf of the South (or vice versa).

In addition to all the good things one might say about Sewanee, it has the added bonum for Bruss that one of its founders, Bishop Polk, was given as his Christian name the deliciously Greek "Leonidas"!

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News from Jenny Brown '01 (Classics major):

I graduated from the University of Massachusetts in May, 2003, with an M.A.T. in Latin and Classical Humanities. UMass was a very good experience for me. The workload was demanding - I had to learn to read Latin a lot faster to survive! But I enjoyed it and learned a great deal. The best part about the program was getting to teach college students while I was learning about teaching; it enabled me to put what I was learning into practice. Now that I have started my first full-time teaching job, I can really see how much I benefitted from the program, from knowledge of Latin literature and the Classical world to pedagogical approaches and textbooks to the hands-on teaching experience that I got there. All in all, I think it prepared me well for teaching Latin.

I am now living in Pennsylvania with my sister Catherine (who is working in the administration of the Academy of Vocal Arts, a conservatory for opera singers in Philadelphia). I am teaching at the Tower Hill School, a prep school in Wilmington, Delaware. I teach middle school (7th & 8th grades) and upper school (10th-12th grades). (I teach all the Latin classes except 9th grade.) I really like teaching such a wide range of students. The middle schoolers have so much energy, which makes them fun to teach. But I enjoy teaching the AP classes (Catullus/Ovid & Vergil) as well and getting to expose students to Latin literature. Preparing for five different classes everyday is beginning to wear me down a bit, but I am looking forward to next year, when I will be able to draw on what I did this year instead of doing everything from scratch.

If you know of anyone who is interested in teaching middle school Latin part-time in Wilmington, let me know. My school may be hiring a part-time middle school Latin teacher next year.

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News from Lisa Pierce '01 (Medieval Studies major):

I've just submitted my MA dissertation in LaterMedieval Studies and need to share my excitement. For the last year I've been living in York, England, where I've been a graduate student in the University of York's Centre for Medieval Studies. I've had an exciting time, both living in such a charismatic city and studying its history. My MA course was only one-year long and thus very intensive, but well worth it. The past 5 months have been devoted to examining the translation of learned French surgical texts into Middle English and their vernacular dissemination within later medieval England. I must say, the resources here are AMAZING!! There's an entire library in London devoted to the history of medicine, and it has been an absolute godsend! Now that the dissertation is in, I'm feeling a bit lost, but am returning to MN and plan to complete my Chemistry BA (started at St. Olaf) and perhaps return to England to teach. An odd change from Medieval Studies, but this year has taught me that although I love history, I need a scientific discipline in my life as well. Hopefully, one day, I'll be able to combine the two loves.

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News from Martha Beck Sandli '00 (Medieval Studies major):

Martha and her husband Anders live in Coralville, Iowa, just outside Iowa City, where Anders is an intern architect at Rohrbach Carlson. He earned his Master's of Architecture from Iowa State this past May. On June 24, 2003, Martha gave birth to Oliver Caspian, pictured below.

She writes, "It was truly the most amazing experience of my life. Today, Oliver is eight weeks old. He's smiling and just beginning to giggle. We cannot determine what color eyes he shall have; they are dark gray for the moment. His hair is blond. He keeps me happily busy nursing and washing diapers. Anders gets his share of diaper changing in the middle of the night and on weekends, which he thoroughly enjoys. Of course, we're both feeling rather tired yet beginning to establish a daily rhythm."

Congratulations to Martha and Anders and welcome to Oliver!

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News from Andrew Strong '00 (Classics & English major):

I am working as a missionary/English teacher at a Lutheran High school in Kumamoto, Japan. It is a great place to live, and the job isn't too bad. I am finishing my third year and am planning to be here another two. I have decided to undertake a Master's degree in Advanced Studies of Japanese this fall.

Andrew Strong
andrewhstrong@hotmail.com

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From Jeremiah Harrelson '99 (Classics major), who just completed his M.A. in Biblical Studies at Denver Seminary (receiving the Zondervan Greek Award), and his wife Laura, who just obtained her nursing license, comes this photo of Jeremiah holding their baby daughter Isabel Analise, born on April 11, 2002. Congratulations!

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News from Garett Gentry '97 (Greek major):

After college I moved back to Oregon for a year to think about the next step, learn to cook, buy a car, get to know my hometown as an adult. I worked as a hospital interpreter in the afternoons, and took intensive German and Latin in the mornings in preparation for whatever schooling might be next.

I decided on Divinity School after all, and moved off to Yale in the Spring, only to meet about fourteen people from St. Olaf who'd done the same thing. Yale was fantastic. I did an M.Div, and worked in a bilingual church for two years and a hospital for one. I also got a degree from a little Episcopal seminary.

It looked like ordination in CT would take several years, though. In theory I support it, but, more practically, I want to pay down this debt. I also wanted a change of pace and some perspective on things, so here I am in New York City. I'm a researcher in Latin American Equity Strategy at Merrill Lynch (meaning I read foreign newswires all day and translate a lot). It's nothing I ever thought I would do, or that I would think to stay in, but the change feels good for a while. Still, I moved here and started work the week before Sept. 11, directly across the street, and besides running for my life that morning, it's been quite an adventure since then.

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News from Steve Yaeger '90 (Classics major):