WashU hosted the annual Illinois Classical Conference October 9–11. An enthusiastic group of scholar-teachers from all over Illinois descended on Umrath Lounge for several days of delightful intellectual exchange. The conference featured a number of excellent panels, with special strength in pedagogical presentations with practical classroom applications.

We had two outstanding presentations by our own students:

Bayla Kamens gave a presentation in lively Latin on the Latin role-playing game that their beginning Latin students played last year; participants in the conference had the chance to play the game themselves, and several of Bayla’s students were in the audience and able to speak about how useful the experience had been in their Latin education.

No less impressively, Isabel Sapp—only a sophomore!—gave a remarkably polished presentation on fourth-wave feminism and the novel The Silence of the Girls. Isabel was a super engaging speaker, and her presentation generated lively discussion, where she showed herself a master not only of this novel, but of a wide variety of contemporary fictional retellings of ancient myth and history.

Well done, Isabel and Bayla!

We look forward to further intellectual and social exchanges with our friends on the other side of the Mississippi.