Dr. Seumas Macdonald

Seumas has been learning Ancient Greek and Latin for over 20 years, and involved in teaching, tutoring, and applying living language methodologies for the past 15. He holds a PhD from Macquarie University, Australia, in Ancient History (2017), and since then has been developing and teaching Greek and Latin as living languages. His particular interests are in seeing learners become confident readers of the full breadth of ancient and less-ancient literature, and confident speakers able to use the language for everything from discussions of philology and philosophy, through to the truly modern and absolutely absurd.

    Isaac Bennett-Smith

Isaac is a PhD student at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington, where he has taught ancient Greek and Latin, worked as a learning designer, and tutored Greek and Roman literature, culture and history. In 2020 he started an informal series of classes, conversations, activities, and tabletop role-playing games in ancient Greek and Latin at the university, fostering a vibrant and tightknit community of learners. Isaac also organises and collaborates on student translations of Greek and Latin plays each year for the Victoria Ancient Theatre Society, bringing the likes of Aeschylus, Euripides, Menander, and Seneca to life on the modern stage. He has recently completed a master’s thesis on women’s lives in the plays of Menander and is now working on a study of the ancient Greek translation of Harry Potter.

Fletcher Hardison

Fletcher began learning Ancient Greek in high school, and now, 15 years later, uses it daily in his translation work. He studied linguistics in university, culminating in a Masters degree from the University of North Dakota (2014). In 2018-2019 he taught Greek informally to a small group of learners using communicative methods. His hope is for learners to come to love the language and the texts written therein without the stress of traditional grammar/translation methods.