Floreat Lisa
Concordia undergrad Lisa Tweten has her professor and Plautus to thank for going to Philadelphia next year.
“I wouldn’t have sent it in had Professor George Harrison not told me to do it,” she says, of the research project she was initially reluctant to submit.
The third-year undergraduate in honours classics with a concentration in classical civilizations is still shocked that she was one of six undergrads in North America chosen to present their papers at the American Philological Association next January.
Tweten’s assignment last fall was to analyze a performance of the play Poenulus, written by Plautus in around 200 BC and performed by the University of North Carolina’s Department of Classics and recorded in 1994.
Harrison asked each student in his class to submit their papers to the association, but Tweten had no intention of sending hers, she says. When her professor personally asked her once more to submit her assignment, she finally agreed.
The story of Poenulus is about a man’s bid to save a prostitute from her master. Tweten says that exaggerated gestures and a few English passages made its 1994 adaptation, performed in Latin, very accessible to all audiences.
“This play shows that people haven’t changed much in 2,500 years,” she says, “we still find the same things funny.”
Tweten had the choice of performing a play or writing a term paper for her winter assignment. She opted for the term paper because she says she’s much too shy to perform. Good thing she’ll have a year to prepare to address the American Philological Association.
Related links:
• Department of Classics, Modern Languages and Linguistics
• American Philological Association