LEARNING AND U

Prof aims to inspire

“The best professors I had made it contagious for me.
They inspired me to be very critical in my thinking.”
– Lisa Hughes

By Alex Frazer-Harrison

hen Dr. Lisa Hughes first stood in front of a classroom of nearly 200 students, she felt like a gladiator being sent into battle.

“ I really felt intimidated,” recalls the assistant professor of Greek and Roman Studies. At the time, Hughes had just finished her MA at the University of Alberta and was asked to teach an introductory mythology class with nearly 200 students. “The majority of the students were close to my age. It was at that point that I realized how much work (teaching) takes.”

Hughes, who received one of the 2003-2004 University of Calgary Students’ Union Teaching Excellence Awards, came to the U of C three years ago after taking her BA and MA degrees at the University of Alberta and her PhD from Indiana University.

“ I didn’t plan to go into Classics,” she says. “My BA was in French Language and Literature.”

Hughes took a Roman Art and Architecture course, and one day the professor invited students to accompany her to a dig in Italy.

“ Being an Alberta girl, I never had any experience abroad,” Hughes says. “I wanted to have the opportunity to go to a foreign country and see this material I had been studying.

“ It was the clincher for me. The hands-on experience opened up a passion. It was so different from anything I’d seen in Canada.”

Hughes credits strong professors for nurturing her interest in Classics. “The best professors I had made it contagious for me,” she says. “They inspired me to be very critical in my thinking.”

She became interested in the “iconographic representation of freed slaves” in the Roman period, and has focused her research on how slaves of the time looked at themselves and their own culture.

“ If you became a slave, you lost any previous family ties and were brought into a new familial environment,” says Hughes. “What kind of new relationships were made, and how were they carried through after the slaves were freed? What were the relationships like between former slaves and their former masters? Those are the types of questions I’m exploring.”

Hughes hopes to inspire future Classics researchers in her classes.

“ It’s all about being enthusiastic – how do you make this stuff interesting and relevant? I want to show students that there is a practical use for this,” she says.
“ Law, science, education – these are all issues the Ancients had to deal with. Some of the questions they asked are very relevant today.”

Hughes says she’s still learning the tricks of the teaching trade.

“ I consider teaching to be a work in progress,” she says.

“ (Success in teaching) includes knowing your students’ limitations and listening to them and watching them very carefully. I ask a lot of questions, and I try to make myself as accessible as possible to my students.”

When she isn’t teaching, Hughes enjoys visiting the mountains, but admits her free time is soon going to become rare as she’s expecting her first child later this year.

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