Our next spotlight feature is Wendy Vencel, a 2018 Butler alumna. She graduated with honors with a B.A. in History and Classics. Since leaving Butler, she has continued on in academia and is currently earning a Master of Medieval History at the University of Edinburgh. Her current research interests surround the study of women and gender identities developed in early medieval Scotland (spanning from roughly 700CE to 1000CE) and she will be completing her master’s dissertation on the topic this August. Check out Wendy’s story below!
The Classics department at Butler was my home for three of my undergraduate years. I added the major after taking the Greek Art and Myth course. However, I had already had a background in Latin from high school and I had long been interested in the Greco-Roman world through things such as the Percy Jackson series and movies such as Troy. After studying abroad with Dr. Bungard in Italy in the summer of 2016, I was hooked! I loved taking Ancient Greek and could not be more grateful for the opportunity to not just study in Rome, Italy, but also to participate in the field school program at the Nemea Center for Classical Archaeology. Classics at Butler allowed me to explore the field of archaeology, a passion that I have continued into my graduate studies. In addition to being a past intern for AMCA, I am a member of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA) and will be participating in my second field school this coming September on Kildavie, a medieval settlement on the Isle of Mull. I like to take interdisciplinary approaches to my research and rely heavily on archaeological evidence when writing about early Scottish history where textual sources are scarce and archaeological sources can fill the silences. As a general reflection of my undergrad experience, Butler’s emphasis on small class sizes and seminar-style teaching perfectly prepared me for graduate school where classes contain a maximum of 15 people and are led by the students’ own interests and observations rather than a lecturer’s preset agenda.
While I have left the classical world behind me, I continue to lean on my classical studies background as I look at the medieval world. To start, the work I was able to do on women’s and gender history while in the classics program has directly related to the research I have pursued in grad school. This includes discussing how genders are developed within a medieval Scottish context as well as the effects of the construction of toxic masculinity on medieval men. The latter being a continuation of a paper I wrote in my final semester at Butler for Dr. Kvapil’s Intermediate Ancient Greek course on the toxic masculinity of Hektor in Book 6 of Homer’s The Iliad.
After completing my degree, I will be returning to Indiana to teach high school. History is such an important subject for young people to learn and I think it is important for historians and classicists to engage with students of all ages so that they are well aware of the historical contexts for the events of modern day. I am very grateful for my time spent in the Classics program at Butler University and for the amazing people and opportunities it gave me in my academic journey.