I am applying for a Mellon Teaching and Technology Fellowship from the ACS in order to further enhance my teaching through computer technology. Last summer at the Classics and Technology Seminar held at Rhodes College I learned fundamental skills for using the computer in my humanities courses. As a result of last summer's seminar I now successfully include the internet in my language and literature classes. Through my web page, my students have access to my syllabi which includes links to many on-line sources such as Perseus Project, the Louvre, the Vatican Museum and Library, and many,many others. As a result of my enthusiasm and success in using the internet in my classrooms, I have been asked and have agreed to act as a mentor to the Arts and Letters Humanities faculty here at Millsaps. I have already done formal demonstrations from my colleagues in various departments, including the department of Classical Studies.

I am usually constrained by financial need to teach summer school but if I receive the Mellon Fellowship I will have the means to work on my technology project during the summer. Specifically, I would like to design an interdisciplinary, multi-cultural humanities Core Course on comedy to be taught next Fall. This course will be designed to examine the comedies of various cultures within the context of each culture's definition of and representation of humor. This course will include readings in Greek and Roman comedies, the medieval comedies of Hroswitha, a comedy from the English and/or French Renaissance and selected comedies from African, Indian and Japanese literature. It will include, among others, critical materials on performance theory, theories of transgression, and catharsis theory from, among others, Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Augustine, Freud, Bakhtin and non-western critics such as Said et al. The development of this course will necessitate many hours of on-line research for relevant sites, blbliography and the design of the interactive aspect of the course. I foresee this course as containing everything an instructor would need to teach the course: the syllabus, the daily assignments, links to pertinent secondary materials, images and sites, an on-line assignments and interactive exams. The director of our Core Curriculum, Dr Catherine Freis, has agreed to oversee the interdisciplinarity and multi-culturalism for its relevancy to the Humanities reguirements. The course will be evaluated and approved by the Millsaps Core Council before implementation into the curriculum. At this point, the course will be availble for all Humanities faculty in the ACS.

I would like to consult with others in the ACS who can help me with this project. For example, I will need to learn how to design interactive assignments and on-line exams. I would also like to use VROMA in my classrooms and will need to learn how to do so. It may be necessary to invite a circuit rider to Millsaps for this information.

And finally, if time permits, I would like to develop a virtual classroom for teaching courses in ancient Greek and/or Latin language to students in the ACS. This would be most helpful to small departments like my own who do not have the resources to offer advanced students the number of translation classes they need for graduate school. Tom Martin of Holy Cross has offered to help members of the ACS develop virtual courses in classical languages.

I have received the support for this project from the Dean of my College, Richard Smith; the Associate Dean of Art and Letters, Judith Page; the Chair of the Department of Classical Studies and the Director of the Core Curriculum, Catherine Freis; the Arts and Letters Division representative to the Millsaps Technology Task Force, Darby Ray; and Dr Robert Shive, our representative to the ACS Technology Task Advisory Committee. All have agreed to provide me with the necessary support during my work and assess my achievements after completion of my project. I will submit a progress report at the end of my fellowship period and another assessment report along with documentation after the first use of the project materials.