Faculty Spotlight
By Carol Severino
Debra Trusty, Director of Undergraduate Studies and Lecturer in Classics, aspires for her students to be as engaged with the ancient world as she became when she was an archaeology and classics student. At that time, Trusty learned ancient Greek, studied abroad in Greece, participated in and helped supervise excavations, and obtained her Ph.D. in Classics from Florida State. Among her research interests are Bronze Age (2000-1100 BCE) archaeology and material culture, and Mycenaean ceramics and political economy, the topic of her dissertation. She has been teaching at UI since 2017.
Trusty took a group of UI students to Athens in summer 2019; she plans to do the same in 2022 and in future summers. Leading study abroad tours is one way she can share her love of Greece, both ancient and contemporary. Another way is through writing projects that take students on intellectual journeys to the ancient world. I met with Trusty one afternoon in Summer, 2021, where she explained to me two of her favorite assignments: the “Mytheme” project for Classical Mythology (CLSA:2016) and her creative sequence of five assigments for Mythmakers of the Classical World (CLSA:3016).
Classical Mythology averages 300 students with six TAs for the discussion sections. Trusty is the lecturer for this large course. A primary goal of the course is for students to understand major ancient Greek and Roman gods, heroes, and myths in the context of Greco-Roman life, culture, ethics, and values. Another goal is for students to be able to compare the values of ancient Greco-Roman cultures with those of US cultures.
Trusty teaches the Honors discussion section, where she assigns the semester-long “Mytheme” project (read as “Myth-theme”). From a list of 50 options, students choose one theme and post to the ICON Discussion Board ten examples from ancient texts of the theme’s appearance in myths. Such varied themes include bears, dogs, eyes, mirrors, dance, singing, musical instruments, wind, and suicide. Steadily throughout the course students must read primary materials and write in their ICON Mytheme journals; they need to have at least five examples of their theme a month before the paper is due. The final product is a 1200-word paper worth 20% of the course grade on the cultural significance of their Mytheme. Using a modern secondary source helps students articulate its meaning, and Trusty provides them with plenty of resources from the University Library website and on ICON.
The major goal for this assignment is for students to dive deep into primary source material, and working inductively, to identify common threads among the 10 occurrences of the theme. What larger meanings do these seemingly minor details add up to? A secondary goal is to give students the experience of writing a paper in a formal style.
A scaffolding element that Trusty has added to this assignment is a small-group workshop where they share their theme examples with one another. Because each student has a different theme, they can more freely discuss their own examples and comment on one another’s. Trusty says that students acquire insights from each other about the cultural meaning of their theme. Many students are already passionate about mythology, having read Rick Riordan’s young adult Percy Jackson series, a major reason they enroll in the course. These readers help motivate less motivated students. Students need to fill out a worksheet reporting on what they learned from the workshop, which serves as a drafted outline for the paper. Trusty then comments on the worksheet to ensure that students are on the right track and on their way to an in-depth analysis.
The best papers she receives feature a grand but substantiated cultural observation demonstrating that the writers have developed empathy with Greco-Roman culture and understand its values and roots. Often students reveal cultural connections that had not occurred to Trusty. For example, she received one paper about eyes and their association with the soul and immortality and another about wolves, dogs, and notions of civilization or the lack thereof. The weaker papers don’t go deep enough and don’t display enough cultural significance; there is no obvious “why.”
Since 2019, Trusty has also been teaching an exciting sequel to Classical Mythology called Mythmakers of the Classical World to familiarize students with less frequently read authors and less common versions of myths. She has been experimenting with a sequence of assignments in which students create their own myths and then reflect on the choices they have made. Because they involve careful reading and research, these assignments are the perfect blend of academic and creative writing. Their goal is to help students appreciate the role of myth and storytelling in a culture, including their own. The sequence starts out with writing in the style of Homer, Sappho, Horace, or Callimachus, “an ode about or prayer to someone or something you encounter on a daily basis and value its functionality/purpose/existence.” (Students can’t choose coffee because it’s too common). The second assignment, called “Behind the Scenes,” is to write a story of the major god/goddess or hero/heroine that you relate most to, but from the point of view of a minor character in that myth. The third is a translation exercise; the fourth, a transformation of a Daily Iowan news story into myth. The fifth and last assignment is to modernize an ancient myth and set it in the last 10 years.
Iowa students, Classics majors and non-majors alike, are fortunate to be able to work with Trusty, a passionate, talented, and versatile professor committed to engaging them in writing projects that take them on academic and creative intellectual journeys to the ancient world.