The idea for Deborah Beck’s podcast, Musings in Greek Literature, burst forth from her head like the goddess Athena from the head of Zeus.
“I was talking with a colleague about experiential learning,” says Beck, an associate professor of classics at UT Austin, “and I thought, well, what does experiential learning look like for people studying pre-modern material? Not everybody has the means to go to places where things happened in the Classical past. And then I suddenly thought, ‘Hey kids, let’s make a podcast!’ It jumped out of my head fully formed.”
That moment of inspiration has turned into three seasons and counting of Musings in Greek Literature, a podcast hosted by Beck and a rotating cast of her advanced undergraduate students. Each season follows the work of one class as it closely studies a classical Greek text, such as Homer’s Iliad or Sophocles’ Antigone. The goal isn’t to offer an extensive overview of the whole work — that, after all, is what the class itself is for. Instead, after an introductory episode by Beck, the individual episodes are hosted by one or two students and concentrate on a single selected passage of their choosing. While the hosts may get in to the nuts and bolts of one or two Greek phrases, their goal is to make the subtleties of their chosen scene accessible to a general audience, no specialist training required.
The themes the student hosts choose to emphasize can seem strikingly modern. In the latest season, which covered Apollonius’ Argonautica — an epic poem that tells the story of Jason, Medea, and the golden fleece — students used the text as a jumping off point for conversations about relationship dynamics, the unique pressures society places on women, mental health, grief, and more. But it’s less about bringing the classics to the present than it is about pulling out the narrative threads common to humanity, then and now.
“Part of what I want the podcast to do is help students think about why these texts continue to connect with us as humans,” says Beck. “We’re humanists, and that means thinking about what it means to be a human and figuring out how to talk about the things that our texts say to us about being a human.”
But figuring out how to have those conversations in a podcast format required more than Beck initially expected.
“It’s taken me several iterations of the podcast to really understand what my students can and can’t do and where, technologically, they need help, as well as where to find the resources at UT that can help us make this happen,” she says. “I’ve had a pretty major learning curve for how to make it not just doable but enjoyable for the students.”
A breakthrough came when Beck was selected to join UT’s Provost’s Teaching Fellows program, which supports faculty members as they pursue a teaching initiative over the course of two years. The first two seasons of Musings in Greek Literature were out when she joined the program in 2020, but the network of faculty members Beck met through the program connected her with resources that have allowed for ever more polished podcasts and processes.
Chief among those resources is the audio team at Liberal Arts Instructional Technology Services, or LAITS. Now, instead of having to stitch audio files together and post them to podcasting services herself — Beck makes it clear that she didn’t enjoy the task — she simply has her students record themselves using their phones or Zoom. Then she sends the files, along with detailed edit notes, to the LAITS team, who takes care of the rest.
Freed from the bulk of the technological responsibilities, Beck has more capacity to coach her students on how to choose topics and write scripts that will enable them to explore their interests and knowledge in a widely accessible way.
“In order to create a podcast that was both informative and fun to listen to, I had to force myself out of that ‘academic’ style and find a way to connect to whoever might listen, not just a classmate or a professor,” says Albion Siriban, a student who worked on the Antigone season. “And in trying to engage this anonymous listener, I ended up engaging myself and connecting again to why I started studying ancient languages to begin with.”
That experience, of sharing scholarly pursuits with a broader public in an engaging way, gets at the heart of what Beck hopes her students take away from the project. Many of her undergraduates go on to teach Latin or ancient Greek, and preparing a podcast episode can help prepare them for the classroom. Even more importantly, it can help students get a sense of the lasting importance of what they’re doing while simultaneously pulling back the curtain on the study of Greek texts.
“I want to send my students out to help people understand what we’re doing in a Greek classroom and why it matters,” Beck says. “Is a person with no interest in classics going to suddenly run to the nearest community college and take beginning Latin after they listen? Probably not, but this does speak to a wider community of people who are dilletantes in the original, positive sense of the word, people who are reading these texts for the love of it as devoted, passionate amateurs. And I’m very interested in working out how we can talk about scholarly things in a way that makes sense and seems worthwhile and interesting to people outside the scholarly ecosystem we’re in here at UT. I don’t want our texts to simply be restricted to specialists, I think that’s terrible and wrong.”
Beck doesn’t know for sure when the next season of “Musings in Greek Literature” will record — she’s hoping for some time in the 2023–24 school year — but she’s clear that it’s a project she hopes will last for a long time. There’s no competing with the classics, but there will always be reasons to keep coming back to them.