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Dear Alumni, Students, and Friends,
 Greetings! I am Lissa Crofton-Sleigh, the new chair of Classics here at SCU. I hope this newsletter finds you all well. I know it’s been a while since our last newsletter (4 years already??), and we have lots to update you on. The past few years have been busy, to say the least. We hired two faculty members, Nicholas Lindberg and Jordan Cohen (see their profiles below), while saying farewell to our longtime colleague, Bill Greenwalt, who is now retired and living in Virginia, as well as Angela Holzmeister, who moved back to her native Kansas. We welcomed a new Department Manager, Heidi Elmore, who shares some of her background and talents with us below. Our resident chronicler Dan Turkeltaub has been updating our department history to reflect these changes. We also underwent a very successful multi-year program review, first conducting a self-evaluation and then inviting faculty from Classics departments at other universities to come to Santa Clara and review our program. We are pleased to report that the external reviewers were very impressed with the curriculum and communities we are building at SCU, as well as our students and faculty themselves.
2024-2025 is a year full of milestones as well. After six years of devoted service as chair of our department, Dan Turkeltaub has stepped down to resume his research and other scholarly projects. His shoes are very hard to fill, and I am grateful for all the guidance and support he has shown me in taking on this position. Additionally, after 30+ years at SCU, John Heath is in his final full year of teaching, and will begin phased retirement in 2025-2026. When he shared with me that he would not be providing any updates for this newsletter, he also stated, “I’m a ghost!” John, we will miss your excellent sense of humor if nothing else most of all.
Changes in our faculty and at the university level (new Dean, Provost, and President in the last several years) have not stopped our department from growing – we have more majors and minors now than ever before. We continue to develop and teach new classes, expanding both in geographical bounds and in our approaches to Classical material, and finding creative ways to incorporate Classics into nearly every component of the SCU core curriculum (for instance, we now have three Science, Technology, and Society courses, and will soon have a fourth!). We are working on new initiatives to keep increasing our numbers, including a Classical Languages Award to encourage students coming into SCU with previous knowledge of Greek and/or Latin to continue those language classes in our department. We are also in the process of joining an archaeological consortium with Baylor and several other universities to provide our students with the opportunity to participate in summer digs in San Giuliano, Italy, just a little bit north of Rome.
I am happy to be part of our vibrant community, and I know that our successes would not and could not have happened without YOU: our alumni, current students, and friends. Classics House is always brightened by the presence of our students and their interactions with faculty, and even when they graduate, we always enjoy hearing from them and learning what they have gone on to do in their careers and lives. You will see a few alumni updates below, and we hope to add more of them on our website. Please always feel free to reach out to us, even if just to say hello!
Happy Holidays, and best wishes,
Lissa Crofton-Sleigh
Chair, Department of Classics
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