Lectures in Latin

Dr. Erik Ellis is Assistant Professor of Classical Education at the University of Dallas. After graduating from the University Scholars Program at Baylor University with concentrations in Greek and Latin, Dr. Ellis received an MA in History from the same institution and served as a middle school and high school Latin teacher for five years in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Along with Latin, Dr. Ellis was privileged to teach history, logic, and French, the last of which had a decisive effect on his teaching of Latin. Two years into his teaching career, Dr. Ellis began researching and investigating communicative language pedagogy and its application to classical languages. After attending and offering workshops with the Oklahoma Foreign Language Teachers Association, SALVI, and Fr. Reginald Foster, Dr. Ellis left secondary teaching to continue his education. He received an MA in Classics, a Master of Medieval Studies, and a Doctorate in Medieval Studies at the Medieval Institute of the University of Notre Dame and studied at the Polis Institute and the Vatican Library in Rome. One of his research specializations was the history of education with a focus on the history of classical language teaching. Upon graduation, he worked for a year at Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Languages and Cultures, where he received a certificate in Second Language Acquisition Theory and Methodology. Following this, he taught Latin, Greek, and general humanities courses at Universidad de los Andes in Santiago, Chile, and Hillsdale College before moving to his current role in the program in Classical Learning at the University of Dallas.

After a decade of service to Benedict XVI and Francis as a papal Latinist, Daniel Gallagher was named the Ralph and Jeanne Kanders Professor of the Practice in Latin at Cornell University. He holds degrees from the University of Michigan, the Catholic University of America, and the Pontifical Gregorian University, and has published extensively in medieval philosophy, especially in the areas of metaphysics and aesthetics. He is passionate about handing on the Latin language based on the principles and method of his long-time mentor, Fr. Reginald Foster. Professor Gallagher currently lives with his family in Savannah, where he teaches literature and philosophy at Ralston College.

Vukašin Miljković holds a Master’s degree in Classical Philology from the University of Belgrade, Serbia. His interests are wide, including, but not limited to philology (Greek and Latin classical prose, historiography, rhetoric), linguistics (in particular historical linguistics and syntax), and didactic methods (ancient language teaching). A proponent of the active study methods of Latin and Ancient Greek, he spent a year at the Accademia Vivarium Novum where he consolidated his knowledge of spoken Latin and Ancient Greek, as well as at the University of Ioannina, Greece, where he attained high proficiency in Modern Greek as well. As an undergraduate, Vukašin also took part in an exchange program organized by the US Department of State which enabled him to spend a year at the University of Texas at Austin, continuing his studies of Ancient Greek and Latin, as well as getting acquainted with Sanskrit. His teaching experience includes high-school level and university level courses in Greek and Latin (in TA capacity), both in classroom and online, summer school intensive courses, as well as conventional language courses. Currently, he is also studying Classical Chinese and Biblical Hebrew.

Milena Minkova is Professor of Classics at the University of Kentucky. She has published on Latin literature in its continuity, 12th century Renaissance, Latin Composition, Latin Pedagogy, and Active Latin. Together with Terence Tunberg, Minkova has co-authored the introductory Latin series “Latin for the New Millennium.” Both Minkova and Tunberg moderate the Institute for Latin Studies, a Graduate Certificate Curriculum associated with the M.A. Program in Classics at the University of Kentucky, in which Latin is taught in its continuity from ancient until modern times and in the target language (since 2020 the Certificate has been offered online as well). Minkova’s critical anthology of Neo Latin Florilegium recentioris Latinitatis came out from Leuven University Press in 2018. Minkova’s new volume, co-authored with Terence Tunberg, Recentiores, non deteriores is about to be published by Peeters Publishers—it deals with Neo-Latin prose style and ways in which it can impact our approach to Latin today.

Abigail Palmer received her BA in Classics from University of Dallas and her MA in Classics from Fordham University. She is a member of Eta Sigma Phi and Phi Beta Kappa, and holds a certificate from Association Montessori Internationale for the adolescent level of instruction. Over the years she has written Classical curriculum for the high school level and published essays on a variety of topics. This spring she published her first novel, Faelan and the Miracle Machines, an historical fiction work set in ancient Alexandria, Egypt.

Abigail has taught subjects ranging from Latin and Greek to History and Drama in private schools for seventeen years, working with students ages twelve through eighteen. She lives in the Napa valley with her husband and family.

Terence Tunberg completed his doctoral studies in the Department of Classics and the Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies at the University of Toronto in 1986. He began to devote himself to spoken Latin as a graduate student and has since then regularly taken part in seminars for spoken Latin in Europe and North America. In 1998 he was elected fellow of the Academia Latinitati Fovendae, the Rome-based international organization for maintaining the use of Latin. He has moderated the Conventiculum Aestivum, an annual immersion seminar in spoken Latin, for nearly three decades. Together with Milena Minkova he teaches in the Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis at the University of Kentucky, a two-year post-graduate curriculum in which Latin literature and Latin composition are taught entirely in Latin. This curriculum has been
available online since 2020. Terence has published extensively on prose style in classical and Neo-Latin, and has won international prizes for Latin composition. Together with Milena Minkova he has written several works, including a manual of Latin prose composition, and, most recently Recentiores, non deteriores, which is about to be published by Peeters Publishers of Leuven, Belgium. Recentiores, non deteriores deals with Neo-Latin prose language and style, and indicates how the word-choice, rhetorical strategies and sentence structures employed by some outstanding early-modern Latin authors can be highly useful for people interested in writing and speaking Latin today.

Joe Watkins is a PhD Candidate at Boston University, currently working on his dissertation which examines ethnographic representations of Celtic peoples in both Ancient Greek and Latin. He earned his BA at the University of Georgia (2014) and attended a year of Post-Baccalaureate Studies at the University of Pennsylvania (2014-15) before teaching high school Latin in Tucker, GA for three years where he developed a strong interest in language pedagogy. He completed a Masters in Classics at the University of Kentucky (2020), earning a certificate in Latin (Language) studies there at the Institutum Studiis Latinis Provehendis. He is particularly interested in historiography, both Greek and Latin, but enjoys reading widely, both in terms of genre and time period.

David J. White is a Senior Lecturer in Classics at Baylor University, where he teaches Latin and other Classics courses. He has degrees from the University of Florida, Penn, Kent State, and the University of Akron. He works on Columella and other Golden and Silver Age Latin writers. He is active in the living Latin community and from 2018-2022 was the Latin Orator for the Classical Association of the MIddle West and South. He has delivered several papers in Latin at Paideia's Living Latin in NYC and taught for Telepaideia since 2020.