Since 1976, Daniel J. Taylor ’63, the Hiram A. Jones Professor of Classics, has occupied the Main Hall office in which he studied Latin and Greek as an undergraduate with his mentor, Maurice Cunningham. Taylor, who returned to his alma mater as a faculty member in 1974, calls the large corner office that honors his professorship’s namesake “an inspiration to learning and scholarship.”
His scholarship encompasses literature, pedagogy, and linguistics and is reflected in three of his recent publications: “May Eve in the Concilium Romarici Montis” in Neophilogus; “Painting Pictures with Words in Latin” in Voice of Wisconsin Association of Foreign Language Teachers; and “Priscians’s Pedagogy: A Critique of the Institutio de Nomine et Pronomine et Verbo” in Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences.
In March, Taylor took the concept of individualized instruction to a new level, traveling to Italy and turning most of Rome into a giant classroom for two students, Alexis Coates ’08 and Agustìn Manzanares ’07 (pictured), who were taking a tutorial on manuscripts and paleography. Taylor led the students on a tour of the city, where they read nearly 100 Latin inscriptions on statue bases and on public buildings in the Roman Forum and St. Peter’s Square. He also provided them access to a 15th-century manuscript of Varro’s De Lingua Latina from the Vallicelliana Library. The author of two books on ancient Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro, Taylor has been invited to deliver a 50-year retrospective address on the evolution of linguistics at the 2008 International Conference on the History of Linguistics in Potsdam, Germany.
Read more about Professor Taylor
- "A Classics chronology: Recollections of a Main Hall career as student and teacher," Lawrence Today magazine, Summer 2003
- "Lawrence University Linguist Awarded Fulbright Chair in Italy "
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