Daniel Harris-McCoy

Daniel Harris-McCoy, professor of Classics, wants his students to develop a kind of vision; to see their lives as a series of wonders, ideas, and challenges to be solved. He has developed a productive dialectical relationship between his research and teaching. In teaching the rhythmic nature of Latin verb endings, Harris-McCoy challenged a student-musician to set the endings to a hip-hop beat. The immediate pedagogic value appeared as distinctly improved ease with which students learned verb, noun and pronominal forms. Professor and student then recorded two albums to support teaching Latin and Greek. He speaks of an aesthetic of “juiciness” in academe to counter formal, overly rigid thought and behavior. A student reports: “He engaged us all on our human levels; as I imagined ancient Greece was, a meeting of intellectuals as equals, learning from one other. I LOVED THIS CLASS!” Dr. Harris-McCoy secured and refurbished a classroom to resemble a medieval scriptorium or Renaissance antiquarian study, enabling students to sit together accordingly, rather than in the typical campus classroom space.