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The unusual pace of work at the Latin/Greek Institute is made possible by the total immersion experience and the complete attention and dedication on the part of both students and faculty.
All programs are team-taught by experienced instructors, with hourly rotation of staff providing for exposure to a variety of approaches. In addition to our low student-faculty ratio, each student benefits from an assigned adviser and unparalleled access to our entire staff. The principles of team-teaching, individualized instruction, and a very carefully developed structure are some of the major ingredients that have made the programs so successful. The Latin/Greek Institute provides a unique and exciting intellectual environment for all its participants.
There are six to 10 faculty members teaching in the institute each summer.
Eric Bayless-Hall
Eric Bayless-Hall is an alum of the 2019 Basic Greek program. He found there to be nothing like a summer at the Institute, and that for those seeking a thorough understanding of Latin or Greek, the LGI is one of a kind. Eric returned as a member of the Basic Greek faculty in 2023, and looks forward to another summer of its energy and rigors.
When he is not singing verb forms and grammar paradigms Eric is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at The New School, where he works on—among other things—language, aesthetics, and ancient Greek philosophy, with particular interests in Aristotle, Plato, Wittgenstein, and Stanley Cavell.
Carlo DaVia
Carlo DaVia is a Lecturer in Latin and Classical Studies at UC Riverside. He received his M.A. in classics and Ph.D. in philosophy, both at Fordham University. His research draws upon the wisdom of classical antiquity in order to improve the ways in which we think and argue about pressing ethical issues today. As a former student of the Latin/Greek Institute, he cannot adequately express its merits. Students not only learn Greek or Latin with remarkable rigor, they also experience studium in its truest sense. So while some sign up for mindfulness retreats, DaVia prefers to spend his summers memorizing principal parts.
Hardy Hansen
2025 will be my 46th summer teaching in the Greek Institute. I can’t imagine a summer without the Institute.
After getting a B.A. in Classics from Princeton and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard, I spent most of my career at Brooklyn College. I’ve now retired from the College but not from the Latin/Greek Institute.
My LGI career began when Floyd Moreland, who founded the Latin Institute in 1973, decided to add a program in Greek. Gerry Quinn and I agreed to write the textbook. In the summer of 1978 we launched the Greek program, after an unbelievably intense ten months of drafting and re-drafting every word in the book. By then I had become an Institute veteran. Gerry and I had pre-taught every single lesson for an audience consisting of Floyd, Rita Fleischer, and Stephanie Russell, all seasoned instructors in the Latin program. More than once, we had to repeat a class to get the timing right or to make sure that we were completely clear and consistent. I learned a lot about teaching, and I came to understand the collaborative enterprise that is the heart and soul of the Institute.
Sometimes people ask me if I don’t get tired of teaching the same thing year after year. No, I don’t. Every year the Institute is completely new. The students arrive, knowing little or nothing of the language. Ten weeks later, they have read authors like Plato and Euripides, Cicero and Vergil, at a scholarly level few students ever attain. Just as important, they have learned what you can accomplish when you give everything to a task. We know where the students will be at the end of those 50 days. Seeing them arrive there is the richest reward for our effort.
Just as Gerry Quinn and I pre-taught everything before that first summer, the faculty are meeting this spring to pre-teach the material and prepare ourselves for Institute classes. It still takes plenty of preparation, even if you’ve done it many times before.
My main summer recreation is walking all over New York City. I need the exercise, both before and after a day at the LGI. My other extracurricular concern is tapirs.
Yekaterina Kosova
Yekaterina Kosova-Krauss is a three-time alumna of the Latin/Greek Institute and has taught multiple summers of Basic Latin, Basic Greek, and Upper-Level Greek. She holds a B.A. in rhetoric and philosophy from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She studied classics at Columbia University and New York University, receiving her M.A. from the latter in 2011. During the year she is a working artist and carpenter, and teaches Figure Drawing and Anatomy for Artists at Shoestring Studio in Brooklyn. Reading ancient Greek and Latin is one of her main activities even when the institute is not in session. Get in touch with her if you are interested in joining a reading group!
Jeremy March
Jeremy March is a graduate of the 2000 Upper-Level Latin Institute. He is currently a Ph.D. student at the CUNY Graduate Center, having earned an M.A. in classics at the Graduate Center and a B.A. in classics and philosophy from the University of Mary Washington. His interests lie primarily in Greek language and linguistics, Pindar, stylometry and applications of technology in the humanities. Combining his love of classics and technology he developed philolog.us, a website and iPhone app that offers an interface to the Greek and Latin lexica originally digitized by the Perseus Project. As a former student of the Latin/Greek Institute, March believes the intensive study that the institute demands will have a lasting and rewarding impact on all who undertake it.
Thom Murphy
Thom Murphy is a Career Development Fellow in French at New College, University of Oxford. He received a B.A. in Foreign Languages (French/Ancient Greek) from Austin Peay State University, a small state school in Middle Tennessee, and an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from New York University in French Literature. During his graduate studies, he completed coursework at Princeton, Sorbonne Université, and the EHESS, and was a pensionnaire étranger at the École normale supérieure and a doctorant-chercheur invité at Sorbonne Université. A two-time alumnus (Basic and Upper Latin), Thom has been teaching at the Institute since 2021, and has twice chaired the Basic Latin program.
His scholarly work is focused on the early modern idea of “nature” and the ways it was translated (Greek/Latin/French) in sixteenth-century France. Additionally, he is the author of articles, published and forthcoming, on early modern French poetry, classical reception, the early modern dictionary, and the history of philology broadly. Since completing Basic Latin, he has maintained a weekly Latin reading group with fellow alumni. The wonders of the “beyond the intensive” method, as well as wonderful colleagues and students, have continued to call him back to New York summer after summer.
Bill Pagonis
Having been a student in both the basic Greek program (1990) and the basic Latin program (1991), in one way or another, Bill Pagonis has remained close to the institute. He received a B.A. in philosophy from Ohio University in 1990 and came to New York City specifically to attend the institute. Pagonis remained in New York to pursue graduate studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. This summer marks his 14th summer teaching at the LGI. He looks forward to the rigor and intensity that only the institute offers.
Rebecca Rosenthal
Rebecca Rosenthal is an alumna of the Basic Greek program. She holds a B.A. in Ancient Greek and Art History from Swarthmore College. During the academic year, she is a teacher at the Episcopal Academy in Pennsylvania where she teaches middle and high school students Latin, Greek, and, occasionally, farming.
Lucas G. Rubin
Lucas G. Rubin was appointed director of the Latin/Greek Institute in summer 2020. A two-time alumnus (Basic Latin ’95, Basic Greek ’96), he received his Ph.D. in classics from the University of Buffalo. An unabashed enthusiast of the ancient (especially Roman) world and a member of Brooklyn College’s Department of Classics, his scholarship is quite eclectic, including forays into Brooklyn history, the occasional inquiry into classics and classical archaeology, and consideration of higher education policy and practice. Prior to Brooklyn College, he worked at Columbia University in a range of capacities, from coordinator of archaeology programs to director of professionally focused graduate degrees. When the institute is not in session, Rubin is the college’s assistant dean for academic programs, where he administers the college’s extension campus in lower Manhattan and oversees curricular and programming initiatives across campus. He is deeply committed to promoting and advancing the study of Latin and Greek.
Christopher Mark Simon
Christopher Mark Simon is a lecturer in classics within the Department of Comparative Literature and Languages at the University of California, Riverside. He received his A.B. in classics from Princeton University as well as an M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. in classics from Yale University. A former fellow of Thesaurus linguae Latinae, his current research interests broadly embrace Roman historiography and ancient intellectual life, specifically ancient thinking about language, Roman landscapes of fear, and the changing nature of friendship in the first century BC. About him, Sallust might have written: plurumum facere, minime ipse de se loqui. His past students know elephanto beluarum nulla prudentior. This summer marks his seventh year at the LGI.
