Scheler Selected to Participate in Odessey Seminar

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From St. Norbert College, June 19, 2014
by Mike Counter, mike.counter@snc.edu, 920-403-3089

Drew J. Scheler, assistant professor of English and director of Writing-Across-the-Curriculum at St. Norbert College, is one of a select group of faculty members nationwide chosen by the Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) and the Center for Hellenic Studies to participate in an "Ancient Greece in the Modern Classroom" seminar on the "The Odyssey." From a pool of 66 faculty members nominated, CIC and the Center for Hellenic Studies selected 20 faculty members to participate in "The Odyssey," a five-day seminar that will take place July 22--26, 2014, at the Center for Hellenic Studies campus in Washington, D.C.
Scheler's literary specialty is the poetry and intellectual history of the English Renaissance. He is currently working on a book project entitled "The Architecture of Accommodation: Spatial Rhetoric and Ethical Judgment in Renaissance English Poetry." This project considers how Renaissance poets like Spenser, Donne, Jonson and Herbert saw rhetoric as an intrinsically social and ethical discipline. These poets, Scheler argues, used the rhetorical craft to imagine the "common grounds" of cultural debates as shared architectural spaces -- helping readers understand what they might share with their opponents and develop their capacity for ethical judgment. An article drawn from this work, "Equitable Poetics and the State of Conflict in Edmund Spenser's Two Cantos of Mutabilitie," is forthcoming in Rhetorica, the journal of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric. This seminar will offer Scheler an opportunity to examine the many dimensions of the "The Odyssey" in its various historical contexts and explore how the poem (to be read in translation) can be studied in courses that address a variety of literatures and disciplines. Participants will study diverse topics that range from the exchange of luxury goods to the adjudication of disputes arising from athletic contests. Along with providing information and background for understanding Homeric poetry in its ancient contexts, the seminar will devote a substantial portion of each day to reading and analyzing the poem itself.
For more information, visit the CIC website at www.cic.edu/AncientGreece.