We are happy to share that Norman Sandridge, PhD ’05, will return to the Triangle Area as a visiting faculty fellow for Duke University’s The Humanities Writ Large initiative.
For the 2014-2015 academic year Sandridge will continue to develop his own research on the cross-cultural interactions between Greece and Persia. Stationed in the Classical Studies department, Sandridge also will partner with Prof. Joshua Sosin to develop the digital initiative, Cyrus’ Paradise. Sosin, the newly appointed director of Duke Colaboratory for Classics Computing, will help Sandridge improve the first online collaborative commentary for Xenophon’s Education of Cyrus or Cyropaedia. Sandridge originally created the project with David Carlisle, PhD ’09.
The multimedia site features comments and grammatical and syntactical instruction from authorized users. Cyrus “the Great,” the subject of the text, was the first great king of the Persian empire. Sandridge plans to use the site for his teaching once he returns to Howard University and its Ancient Mediterranean Studies department.
The Humanities Writ Large Initiative is a five-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Its purpose is to re-conceptualize the role of the humanities in undergraduate education. The initiative was established to promote the necessary role that the humanities plays in producing citizens and leaders to “obtain knowledge, to analyze it, and to think and act collaboratively in innovative ways to address growing interdisciplinary and global challenges.”