Leona Cottrell: Lighting the Classics Flame One Student at a Time
J
Urbanus ’96 recently earned his Ph.D. in classical archaeology at Brown University’s Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World. His research on the Roman town of Tongobriga in Portugal led to the discovery that this agricultural area, long considered Roman, was originally founded in the Iron Age. Prior to his fieldwork at Tongobriga, Urbanus was an excavation supervisor at the AngloAmerican Project at Pompeii. Jackson Shulman ’03 majored in classics at Georgetown and Brown before returning to Nobles this year as a Teaching Fellow in Spanish and Classics. As part of his classical education, he joined one of the Portuguese digs led by Urbanus. He also studied archaeology, classics and the culture and history of Rome while taking a semester abroad at the University of Bologna. Mike O’Donnell ’98 has taught Latin for seven years, having majored in Greek and Latin at Dartmouth. He began his teaching career at RansomEverglades School in Miami and spent the past four years as a Latin teacher, director of residential life and associate dean of students at St. Mark’s in Southboro. This fall he began his studies for an advanced degree in Greek and Latin at Boston College. Ben Pierce ’94 taught middle school Latin for two years at the Hill School in Middleburg, Va., before deciding he wanted to work with students in the lower grades (first and second). He has been teaching at St. Paul Academy and Summit School in St. Paul, Minn., for nine years. Mercedes Barletta ’97, a member of the Latin Department at Buckingham Browne & Nichols, began ason
Jackson Shulman ’03 in the House of the Menander
studying Latin in seventh grade at Nobles and continued through her senior year. This included AP Vergil and AP Literature with Mark Harrington, Latin III (advanced prose
pleted a dual major in archaeology and classical civilization, followed by a one-year post-baccalaureate in classics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Leona was very instrumental in the direction of both our lives. Her courses open you up. She opened our eyes to a whole world,” he said, “making it exciting.... Leona is very enthralled by her subjecct and that makes her classes spellbinding.” — JACKSON SHULMAN ’03
and Ovid’s poetry) and Greek and Roman Civilization, all with Leona Cottrell, whom she describes as “THE REASON (caps hers) why I decided to study Classics and the individual who inspired me to pursue archaeology.” At Wesleyan she com-
Cottrell, who has taught Latin, and Greek and Roman Civilization at Nobles for some 20 years, is the connective tissue among all these students. She and her husband Brian, an architect, even spent time in Pompeii, under the tutelage of Urbanus and
WINTER 2009–2010 l THE NOBLES BULLETIN l 11