Susan Joseph (Visiting Assistant Professor)
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Office: Locke Hall 264
Phone: (202) 806-5222
E-mail: sfjoseph@his.com

Dr. Joseph received her Ph.D. in comparative literature (Classics and English) from the Catholic University of America. She joined Howard’s Classics Department in 2003 and has also taught at Catholic University. Dr. Joseph has published numerous articles and theater and book reviews in the area of the reception of Greek tragic myth in recent literature, theater, poetry, and film and writes commentary for the eight-concert chamber music series at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

Personal Statement

Staying in Love with Latin
by Susan Joseph, aka Dr J.
Alternative titles: “Classics Forever,” “Classical Gal”
Revised 8/30/06

In the opening lines of The Divine Comedy, Dante’s traveler, in the middle of his life, stuck in a dark wood, sees no way out. By the time the poem ends, the traveler has arrived at a vision of truth. For me, Latin has provided that vision.

Like Dante’s traveler’s, my story abounds in love and conflict. It also ends in illumination. Miss Patterson, my ninth-grade Latin teacher, taught me English grammar, how to memorize word lists in a foreign language, and delight in metaphor. As 14-year-olds, my classmates and I played catch with Miss Patterson’s imaginary little green man, the missing “i” of the second declension genitive singular. Later, Latin made duck’s soup of modern languages. I speak Italian and French, a smattering of German, Spanish, Norwegian, Danish, and modern Greek, and have performed classical songs and opera in Latin and in most of those modern languages as well as in Portuguese, Hebrew, and Russian. But these languages did not suffice. As I delved into the history of the Latin language in grad school it became apparent that I needed Greek.

I had faced an obstacle as an English doctoral student at the University of Maryland. In the early 1990’s, English departments in the United States were enamored of French philosophy, not words. In departments of Classics, however, Philology ruled and still rules. In the Classics Department at UMD, therefore, I pursued my own love for words. The lagniappe was that there I also learned that I should and could teach.

After obtaining a master’s degree in Greek and Latin from Maryland I had wanted to get a doctorate in Classical languages, but a number of factors prevented it. Fortunately, in the full sense of the word, I was among the first to be granted an interdisciplinary Ph.D., from the Catholic University of America, in comparative literature. With my commended dissertation, “Medea in Late Twentieth-Century Theatre: Ancient Sources and Recent Transformations,” I crossed the departmental boundaries of Theater, Greek and Latin, and English and European literature. Although my scholarship has expanded to include the influence of Greek models on European film, Irish literature, and American and European music theater, my main material for teaching and scholarship still comes from my dissertation. My colleagues and students in the Classics department at Howard keep my love for learning and teaching alive.