Faculty Profiles
Henry Binford
 Professor
Henry Binford has been teaching urban history at Northwestern
since 1973 and has been involved with the MALS program since
its inception in the 1980s. In fact, he helped establish the
original program, and is now its academic director.
HB: The classes I teach
for SCS are adaptations of the classes I teach in the daytime.
They are a fusion of materials from my PhD and undergraduate
classes, but the subject matter is essentially the same.
Q: Why is it necessary to adapt classes
at all?
HB: MALS students bring
a rich and diverse set of experiences to the classroom that
give them perspectives apart from full-time students. That
leads to a different sort of discussion. As an example, most
SCS students are from Chicago, and they often share their
encounters with poverty in the class I teach on that subject.
Full-time students, however, are frequently not originally
from the area and cannot offer that direct experience. Another
defining example is that most undergraduates have never had
a mortgage, whereas most SCS students have. My goal is to
lay the foundation where the kinds of discussions that go
on at Northwestern can meet with the experience of the students
in the class.
Q: What are MALS students looking for
when they come to SCS?
HB: Some of them are transitioning
- they might be considering a PhD and just putting a
toe into the academic waters, or they might be thinking about
changing the nature of their work. I've had lawyers
who want to be teachers, business people who want to be writers
- both of those career changes have been successfully
accomplished through MALS.
Q: You've seen continuing education
at SCS transition over the years. How would you characterize
it now?
HB: It is actively innovative
now, and looking for new ways to serve the nontraditional
community. Launching new master's programs is a sign
of that. Within the MALS program, our goal is always to provide
the same academic quality that we do for day classes. It's
the best that Northwestern can offer, only at night.
Sara Monoson
 Associate
professor Sara Monoson has a joint appointment to both the
political science and classics departments at Northwestern.
In the School of Continuing Studies, she teaches classic texts
in the history of political thought for the Master of Arts
in Liberal Studies program.
SM: What I try to stress
is that it is important to study historical and cultural variety
in order to educate our imaginations about what might be possible.
For example, to understand our political selves it helpful
to study ancient Greece, which offers a really rich example
of a democratic culture. And its very strangeness is what
makes it so interesting.
Q: Political theory can be intimidating,
perhaps more so for students who haven't been in the
classroom in a while. Do your students find it daunting?
SM: What we focus on,
really, is close readings of ancient texts. I think that the
students are often able to understand the complexities of
these difficult texts more than they anticipate being able
to. Plato's Republic sounds daunting in the beginning,
but I think they end up loving it.
Q: Would you say that students in your
SCS classes tend to interact with these texts differently
than full-time graduate students do?
SM: I think studies mean something different to MALS students.
There's a closeness between their intellectual work
and their personal experiences; they ask questions that are
tied to the life choices that they are making and the way
they want to think about those choices. In my MALS classes,
I've been able to have some of the most focused discussions
on the texts that I've had in all of my teaching-I
think in part because the students bring a certain urgency
and seriousness to the material that is really refreshing.
Robert Wallace
Professor of classics at WCAS, Robert Wallace is the author
of several books and dozens of articles on ancient Greece
and Rome. He explores topics as varied as politics, literature,
numismatics, and music.
Q: Why, in the 21st century,
should we look to ancient Greece and Rome?
RW: The classical world
is a wonderful world to teach from - 1500 years of human
history around the Mediterranean, and only
the best material has survived. It's hard to surpass
Sophocles.
Q: What classes do you teach
in the MALS program?
RW: I like to vary what
I teach. Greek drama is popular because we still see these
plays and they resonate with us. I offer
a class on mythology regularly. Myths are familiar to us,
but their meanings may be hidden. We use different perspectives
to understand these stories, drawing on psychology and
comparative anthropology. In many mythologies, including
ours, the hero exists between wilderness and civilization:
the Lone Ranger defends townsfolk but lives apart, masked,
in the wilderness with his "wild companion" Tonto.
Q: What's your teaching
style?
RW: My job is to get
the discussion going - I hate to lecture - and to encourage
students to wrestle with controversial problems.
We have fun, too: for a class on the ancient economy - which
was largely agricultural - every student had to maintain
a virtual farm, choosing crops and deciding how to deal with
weekly surprises like hailstorms or pirates.
Q: Do students need to learn
Greek and Latin to take your courses?
RW: No. We read the texts
in translation, and we also read important scholarship about
the texts. The important thing is for
students to learn to read and to think critically.
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