Anise K. Strong's primary areas of interest are Roman social history, gender and sexuality in the ancient world, and the reception of classical culture, especially in modern mass media. She is currently working on transforming her dissertation entitled, "Labeled Women: Roman Prostitutes and Persistent Stereotypes," into a book. She has published articles on ancient incest laws and sexuality in the HBO series "Rome," and has presented at multiple major conferences, including thrice at the American Philological Association annual meeting. She is an affiliate of the Classical Traditions Initiative.
Since I am passionately interested in the use of technology to facilitate the study of history, I was intrigued by a recent project she conducted within an introductory Roman Civilization course last spring.
"Each of the 115 students in the course edited or created a Roman history "stub" article on Wikipedia, ranging from the province of Gallia Aquitania to the house of Julia Felix in Pompeii. Each article contained references to at least one primary source from the ancient world (including images), one encyclopedic source, and one scholarly book or article. Each student also evaluated and commented on two-three other related student-written articles on their discussion pages.
Here's the link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:School_and_university_projects#Northwestern_University_.28Spring_2007.29
It was a wonderfully successful project, although it will be difficult to repeat. Numerous students
- juniors and seniors - told me it was the first time they had ever had to check an actual book out of the library in their college career. Rather than generating a generic, useless paper, they
contributed to the sum of readily accessible human knowledge.
Contact info: Anise-strong@northwestern.edu
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