Kathryn Morgan

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Kathryn Morgan has taught 22 courses since her arrival in 1996 - her teaching shaping almost every part of UCLA's curriculum in Greek studies. Many students have chosen Classics as a minor and sometimes even a major due to the singular experience of Professor Morgan's course on Classical Mythology.

Student evaluations of her teaching include:

• “Professor Morgan - YOU ROCK!“
• “An extraordinary spirit who can relate to students at all levels ranging from vulgar to high intellect. She is a cool intellectual.”
• “I'm sad that it's over.”
• “If I had another thumb, I'd give you three thumbs up.”
• “No other professor has ever made me so envious of the students in her department.”

Kathryn invites her students to rethink their assumptions about ancient myths and recognize how these supposedly uncomplicated stories of gods and heroes are not so simple, but provided ancient societies with a way to think through issues that were important to them: gender, the nature of authority and its connection with violence, the limits of human achievement, the relationship between citizen and state.

In some institutions, mythology courses place a premium on the absorption of data at the expense of interpretation, asking students to memorize, the labors of Hercules, or which god slept with which nymph. Morgan asks, however, why it should matter to a student which legendary character slept with which? It is, she thinks, more important to emphasize the way myths function. These stories do not exist in a cultural vacuum but express the tensions and aspirations of the society that generates them. The study of ancient mythology will thus enable students to identify cultural mythologies of all sorts, including our own. The same drive for careful and contextualized interpretation of texts and societies - coupled with a passion for the glorious intricacy of the ancient Greek language - animates Morgan's other undergraduate teaching, as well as her graduate courses.

Morgan notes that when she taught in the Midwest, a Classics curriculum was sometimes taken for granted as a basic component of general education. She was pleased to find that at UCLA, where students of diverse ethnicities and social backgrounds have no prima facie reason to study the culture of ancient Greece, they nevertheless flock to Classics courses greedy for knowledge, demanding and thoroughly engaged.